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The Weather of this Place -for RDK Here, we too have reds, leaves turning into something like beauty or the beginning of a day after heat. Sailors delight travelling the same stars, over the bones of fellows travellers like so many pick-up sticks on the ocean floor, drowned in charted waters, or not- death is the same, even in a stange country. Here, the wind kisses our bluffs with acid lips, the volcanoes have an ulcerous quake, the sun boxes our children's ears and burns the chinaberry, scarring its branches into the fossil earth. We too have heard of kindness, a gentle rain that washes the earth before it's baked into crumbling runnels the ants run by day, the snakes at night: In bright July, when emptiness rings the place to deafness, the moon's blank face clears for a moment and silvers the barrens- such a cool light in which the unexpected descends, like love or an introduction to a foreign place. Sometimes, once or twice a year, a calm light falls over a shoulder, or the wind rubs warm, like a finger across your palm and over your wrist and that is when you know, in our strange place, that one might go on. That in our world, unlike yours, something like hope doesn't fall casual as weather each year on dirt so firmly packed it seems it will always be there. Lisa Gade is a poet and survivor who lives in the Boston area. Her poems have most recently appeared in Agni, The Southern Poetry Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review and Kalliope.
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