Email Poem

Your IP Address: 104.23.243.100

From Email:	Required Email Address Not Valid.
To Email:	Email Address Not Valid. Required
Subject	Required
Personal Note:
Poem Title:
Poem	All winter the fire devoured everything -- tear-stained elegies, old letters, diaries, dead flowers. When April finally arrived, I opened the woodstove one last time and shoveled the remains of those long cold nights into a bucket, ash rising through shafts of sunlight, as swirling in bright, angelic eddies. I shoveled out the charred end of an oak log, black and pointed like a pencil; half-burnt pages sacrificed in the making of poems; old, square handmade nails liberated from weathered planks split for kindling. I buried my hands in the bucket, found the nails, lifted them, the phoenix of my right hand shielded with soot and tar, my left hand shrouded in soft white ash -- nails in both fists like forged lightning. I smeared black lines on my face, drew crosses on my chest with the nails, raised my arms and stomped my feet, dancing in honor of spring and rebirth, dancing in honor of winter and death. I hauled the heavy bucket to the garden, spread ashes over the ground, asked the earth to be good. I gave the earth everything that pulled me through the lonely winter -- oak trees, barns, poems. I picked up my shovel and turned hard, gray dirt, the blade splitting winter from spring. With hoe and rake, I cultivated soil, tilling row after row, the earth now loose and black. Tearing seed packets with my teeth, I sowed spinach with my right hand, planted petunias with my left. Lifting clumps of dirt, I crumbled them in my fists, loving each dark letter that fell from my fingers. And when I carried my empty bucket to the lake for water, a few last ashes rose into spring-morning air, ash drifting over fields dew-covered and lightly dusted green.
	Type the characters you see in the picture Required