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Amnesia
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And when we were turned out
of our houses, punishment for the fire
we’d set to keep warm,
they made us forget so that,
bereft, the pathways clouded over.
Under possible snow,
harbingers are lost. We sense
disturbance, mice playing brazenly,
cracks in the earth.
Traces say, no longer ours.
We wanted someone
to take over our lives, wanted to be shaken.
We must go into the yard, what’s buried
must be retrievable. Follow the stepping stones.
No longer children in tents but bamboo
cold against our loneliness, shadows on bare feet,
the wind in bushes, stalks.
It was night. Loving acts, natural
of course, and not one was spared,
animals that we are.
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Writer
Bio
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Susan Ludvigson is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, including Northern Lights (LSU Press, 1981), The Swimmer (LSU Press, 1982), Defining the Holy (Iron Mountain Press, 1985), The Beautiful Noon of No Shadow (LSU Press, 1986), To Find the Gold (LSU Press, 1990), Everything Winged Must Be Dreaming (LSU Press, 1993), Helle's Story (Duende Press, 1995), Trinity (LSU Press, 1996), and Sweet Confluence: New and Selected Poems (LSU Press, 2000). Her work has appeared in over eighty journals, including The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Paris Review, Southern Review, Ohio Review, The Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, The Nation, Antioch Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Gettysburg Review. She has been the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Rockefeller/Bellagio Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Writer's Fulbright to Yugoslavia, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry. She was the Spring 2000 Poet in Residence at the University of South Carolina and is a Professor of English at Winthrop University.
sludvigson@rhtc.net
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Other
Pedestal Published Works
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