On the other side of a beach formed from stones, washed of sand, a gray sea swallows the setting sun. Over pints of bitter, close to a salt-streaked window, men repeat to one another stories of boats and hounds. On occasion, they glance out through the gloam, to the darkening hill and a cemetery filled with others not born to their ancestors. Across the road, far back from windows of uneven glass, reflecting the dusk, women quietly knit from knots of dull wool. They talk of the boy with thick, yellow curls who cries out in the night about sails formed from red diamonds. Such cloth these women have never seen, although one recalls a family myth about the day the howling dogs went silent.
—a prose poem by Sherman Souther
I recently learned that a poem of mine will be published in the lovely, timely anthology by June Cotner entitled Earth Blessings: Prayers, Poems and Meditations. I wrote this particular poem, called September’s Early Dusk, when I lived in Colorado. One day I drove from the edge of the foothills of the Rockies out onto the eastern plains, and when I returned, this eight-line poem seemed to tumble from my pen-in-hand into a journal I kept in the car just for that purpose. I was already writing a series of ghazals, a form of poetry from ancient Persia, and September’s Early Dusk fit with that style. This poem of mine also was published in my first poetry collection by Blue Light Press, Solstice Windows.