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      Pruning Burning Bushes

      Poems by Sarah M. Wells

      Pruning Burning Bushes

      Copyright © 2012 Sarah M. Wells. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf & Stock, 199 W. 8th Ave., Eugene, OR 97401.

      Wipf & Stock

      An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

      199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

      Eugene, OR 97401

      www.wipfandstock.com

      isbn 13: 978-1-62032-330-4

      eisbn 13: 978-1-63087-913-6

      Manufactured in the U.S.A.

      Acknowledgments

      Grateful acknowledgment to the following journals where these poems, sometimes in earlier versions, first appeared:

      Alimentum, “My Mother’s Kitchen”

      Ascent, “Cascade Valley”

      Christianity & Literature, “Dent de Lion” and “A Christmas Poem”

      Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), “Hymn of Skin”

      Literary Mama, “The ladies’ quilting club is out today,”

      Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry, “Sifted As Wheat”

      The New Formalist, “Singing Birds”

      New Ohio Review, “Making the Bed”

      Nimrod: International Journal of Prose and Poetry, “Interference” and “Rain Dance”

      Poetry East, “Casa Blanca Lily”

      Poetry for the Masses, “Junction”

      r.kv.r.y, “Daylily”

      Relief: A Christian Literary Expression, “Pruning Burning Bushes”

      Rock & Sling, “Honky-Tonk Bride”

      The Table (Ashland Theological Seminary newsletter), “Thunder”

      Windhover: A Journal of Christian Literature, “Angry”

      “Angry,” previously titled, “The Angry Gardener,” received honorable mention in the Akron Art Museum’s New Words 2009 Poetry Contest.

      Several poems included in this manuscript were originally published in a limited-edition chapbook, Acquiesce, published by Finishing Line Press in March, 2009.

      “Nothing is yet in its true form.”

       —C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

      for Brandon

      and for Lydia, Elvis, and Henry

      Cascade Valley

      Look, my daughter, the pine tree

      dropped its seeds, and here

      a fragile sapling braves the forest floor.

      This used to be a birch tree

      but lightning sliced it, wind heaved

      its heavy breath and now

      the trunk is rust. Sticks once flared

      skirts of springtime buds,

      but now we throw the broken limbs

      into rushing floodwaters

      to see how quickly we could be carried

      away. Always a hair too close

      to the edge, pebbles skitter

      into the river. Let’s find our way

      back from this spring rage, out of the valley

      that catches what used to cling

      above. Climb this mountain

      with its tread marks, hoof prints,

      decomposing oaks—we are not the first

      to grow and fall. But see the way

      the leaves return to earth, the way the dust

      collects? Crocus blades emerge

      from crumbling stumps as if this growth

      does not take more than soil,

      light, and rain. Reach down, my child,

      bring a pine cone home to show

      how miraculously we are carried.

      I. Excavating

      Angry

      “He cuts off every branch in me

      that bears no fruit. . .”

       —John 15:2

      The angry gardener sees

      overgrown, untended beds

      and seethes. He pulls

      the waist-high weeds,

      heavy in seed, and heaves

      them to the compost heap.

      And then the shrubs—

      how they shudder

      in his shadow, hand saw

      pushed and pulled until

      limbs quiver, surrender.

      Pruners snip, his grip

      is sweaty, tight, a frenzy

      to the suckers, rose hips,

      broken stems, spotted leaves.

      The clipping never ends;

      he is severe—takes away

      more than one-third.

      And then mulch,

      fertilizer, buckets of water.

      The landscape sighs,

      breathes with the gardener

      who stands back,

      fists on hips.

      Climbing the American Metal Playground Slide

      I am the groove in the “R” at the center

      rolling forward, narrative ornate

      because I have repainted my primer

      of private history emerald green,

      replacing the rust-red grit I inherited. . .

      though it might only be rouge,

      a ruse of erudition over ignorance,

      making rubies from the affairs

      of faith and farms. I trace the space

      between the dirt and my fingertips anyway,

      as if to lift the elements of my ribs

      from their fissures, a superficial rinse,

      surface shimmer. The root of my fruit

      is still bruised at the base of the tree.

      This rhetoric of theology follows me, I am

      swallowed in iambs of nursery rhymes

      and grace, grandmother of forgiveness

      who handed me the caramel-coated apple

      and said eat all the way to the seed.

      The remaining core is this verse I climb,

      every

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