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Fall 1994, Volume 11.3

Poetry

Jude Nutter

Jude Nutter (M.A., Mankato State University) works for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Her work has appeared, or will appear, in Snowy Egret, Green Fuse, Indiana Review, Appalachia, Mankato Review, Wilderness, among others.


 

A True Story: Mourning Cloaks

Moving out over the land I've been resting.

All day lark song rising like sleep
from the grasses, the herons
all day lifting off in thin
sashays of light. In the wide
ditch the marsh flowers have all
at once fallen
open.

Beyond the fuss of this world the mourning
cloaks keep floating
from their magic palaces of renewal.
What it must mean

to dream yourself wings, wake,
and pour into your life.

Perhaps the lives we make for ourselves
can happen like this. If death
happens like this I suppose we'll emerge,
little epilepsies of colour, and drift
into our living for the first time.
All this time

dreams have been blooming
out from the difficult scaffold of the body.
And you know what dreams are.
Don't you? It must mean

everything to fold open
like a pair of perfect wings,
to be all at once luminous
and with purpose all one's life.
 

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