Country Road
Yesterday,
a singularity of a yellow
road sign: Dead End, gestured
us along the edge of the woods
to a quietude where gravel
peters out and some parent
had mounted for their child
a basketball hoop.
It hangs there still, solitary,
ring sagging, showing rust.
Rotten strings dangle from it.
Father and child elsewhere,
playing different games.
November
In the woods, autumn’s wind-stripped trees
signal vertically, their trunks
gleaming in a low sun.
Nakedness reveals their lovely bones
doubled in every pool from
last night’s fierce rain.
All the forested gullies are layered with
generations of old leaves.
Rot happens, a slow sift into silt,
yet how the tracing of dead weeds
against the sky writes the landscape with
a rude art.
In the roadside ditches
drain-water shines like gold silk.
I ache to write the daylight before it fades,
when in the lambent evening
the power lines down the hill towards us
display their looping filaments of light.
–
Luci Shaw is a poet and essayist, and since 1986 she has been writer-in-residence at Regent College, Vancouver. Author of over thirty-seven books of poetry and creative non-fiction, her writing has appeared in numerous literary and religious journals, and in 2013 she received the 10th annual Denise Levertov Award for Creative Writing from Seattle Pacific University. Her new collection, The Generosity, was released in 2020 by Paraclete Press.