Enjoy the poetry created by Laura Schwartz at Shari Wagner’s poetry workshop on October 12 2019: “Writing Poems at Ceylon Covered Bridge and Rainbow Bottom”
Laura is the head librarian in Geneva for the Adams Public Library System and is active in the community.
Cathedral
Before entering the woods alone along
resolved riverbed, I hid my bicycle behind
the creek’s ridge. Softened under worm
moon, braced for nettle’s greetings, I hopped over
the cracked clay mud, cottonwoods enveloping canopy.
In the shade I would walk those hours alone, eating
flower heads, drinking from stems, chewing roots,
whispering my poems. Now together under hunter’s
moon, this arc, this sanctuary still silences me.
Bottomland
My shadow passes
easily through the days as
curious clearweed,
beneath hunter’s moon,
this giant gray sycamore,
or sanctuary.
Where cacophony
of the crickets, birds and frogs
become our prayers.
Sanctuary
The open mouth
of a giant sycamore swallowed
us whole, on our bellies we slid
inside its sanctuary to explore each
other, our breath as quiet prayers
inside the silent weeping walls
of this dark bottomland cathedral.
Phosphorescent life alights against
wood’s porous lined decay. Our quiet
communion an intimate sight in this
cavernous emptiness, enveloped
in warmth looking up into the trunk’s
two mysteries that we embrace
as one of our own.
Photos were taken October 12 2019 at Rainbow Bottom along the Wabash River.
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