And Lightning When the Spirit Flares
By Leonore Wilson
A kingfisher’s blue bolt and flame’s
soft thunder in the night earth and air
of California, our mythologized West…
Flame a barbarous crimson sparking
the cobwebbed grass, powdered cornstalks,
alders shaggy with catkins, and again
lightning like the broken voice of a crow
sedge-warbler, nightingale, the belling of stag
echoing among the arrogant peaks,
Clytemnestra’s love-shout in the dazzle
dark, Thor’s hammer’s swung…
And embers quick jumped, skited high
scoured by wind as the seedling birch
hissed and spat, jiggled and settled,
as the script of briars coiled in ditches
and soot flakes of summer free-willed
almost jubilant, ferreted themselves
down as the lathe of ploughs turned-up
the long acres’ breath, east and west,
south and north until flame earth-red
became more and more unstoppable…
Leonore Wilson is a college English and creative writing teacher from Northern California. She is on the MFA Board at St Mary’s College of California. Her poetry books are Western Solstice (Hireath Press) and Tremendum, Augustum (Kelsey Press). Leonore’s work has been in The Iowa Review, Third Coast, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Upstreet, Madison Review, Laurel Review, Pif, etc. Her historic cattle ranch and family home in Napa Valley were recently destroyed in the LNU fire.
