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Tom Johnson
Poetry Editor
POETRY BY PAUL RICE
A Photo of Flagler Chapel Taken from Highway 44
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divided in half
by a rough line of low hills
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this picture
paints a sky
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near white,
then light blue,
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then high
sapphire
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where it vaults
clear up
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and out of
sight.
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the earth itself
seems shocked
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at all its
autumn.
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to the right
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a cornfield
hides from crows.
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goldenrod
poses in the foreground.
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trees shout
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as loud a
yellow as they can
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and still
remain
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inside all
natural law.
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one bare
maple
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reaches up and
to the left,
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scrawling the
word "winter"
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with its
scraggly limbs.
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it has settled
down
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without its
leaves
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already as grey
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as it knows the
sky will turn,
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content to be
partly soil
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and partly
cloud,
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yet very much
its own agriculture,
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its own
weather.
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in the distance,
Flagler Chapel
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small, white,
angular
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in a flurry of
curves.
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if you don't
look closely,
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you will miss
it altogether
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Flower -Handed People
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Petroglyphs at the Tsankawi Anasazi Site, New Mexico
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out of the
womb, the flower my daughter,
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and out of
her two hands,
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as fat as
peonies.
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and now,
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from my girl's
little hand,
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a bloom bent
around a pink crayon,
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come the
flower-handed people,
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their hands
each a circle
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with five
petals.
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the
flower-handed people smile and wave
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out of the
childish paper.
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I lift the page
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and see behind
it
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ash cliffs of
Tsankawi
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where the hard
basalt tools of Anasazi mind
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have cut the
rock face
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into horned
snake and forked fire.
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here too are
flower-handed people,
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and their
hands
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are exactly
those my daughter draws.
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the
flower-handed people
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wave out of
the stone.
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my daughter
climbs the cliff,
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her bare feet
firm in a path worn deep
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in another
millennium;
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with a pink
finger
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she traces the
petroglyphs scored in the rock,
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and for the
moment they fuse
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my girl
child the Ancient Ones,
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the flowers,
their hands,
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and always the
flower-handed people,
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a pattern cut
into the common blood
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growing
blossoms, rich blossoms
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out of the dry
desert stone.
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Love in Horry County
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dew,
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the wine of
kudzu bloom,
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is wet on the
whippoorwill's tongue.
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down sand
roads,
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the country
young steam the windows,
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groan to sow a
crop of seed
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to grow the
folks
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who groan to
seed the soil anew.
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in swamps, the
yin of honeysuckle flower,
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yang of grinnel
milt,
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soggy mense
of amphibian jelly
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load the air
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with all the
smelly elements
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that pass for
Horry County myrrh.
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fly mounts fly.
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nightmoth
sucks
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the sweetpea's
vulvic frankincense.
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bounty of egg
and pod and belly.
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the county's
oozing succulence.
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nightbroth
swells to fruit,
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and then to
creature,
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miles from any
court of law,
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any preacher.
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Paul Rice is professor of English at Coastal Carolina
University, where he specializes in modern and contemporary British and American poetry. His work has won
numerous awards and has appeared in such journals as Poetry, Kansas Quarterly, Poet Lore,
Bitterroot,
The Georgia Review, Negative Capability and Tar River Poetry. He is the 1995 96 recipient of
the poetry fellowship awarded by the S.C. Arts Commission.
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