ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Hannah VanderHart lives and teaches in Durham, NC. She has her MFA from GMU and is currently at Duke University writing her dissertation on gender and collaboration poetics in the seventeenth century. She has poems published at Ruminate, Cotton Xenomorph, The McNeese Review, Thrush and Unbroken Journal.
Signs
We are bulldozing trees in our town
with the fervor and hum we once
gave to religion. We called those days
revivalism. What we do now with
bulldozers we call business development:
now the corner lot by our house, now
the woods at the corner of Duke St.
and Lakewood, where a man lay
in his sleeping bag for a week before
NO TRESPASSING signs went up.
He looked like peace, laying
in the dappled light, asleep in a wood.
Now the signs come down with the trees,
the birds sing in closer formation:
the trees by our house have eyes
and beaks and many wings, like an old
French carol or like an illumination,
the song transcribed, and the light —
the light is everywhere the trees are not,
it warms the backs of the bulldozer’s
tires and the ground, the clearing.
Our road doesn’t hold the ice like it
used to, when the trees caught the light
in their branches, sent their shadows
deep and sideways. My three-year-old
remembers the ground as always bare.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
