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Born, Again and Again

By Pattiann Rogers Essay

I GREW UP NEAR A SMALL RIVER in southwest Missouri, really a large creek, an easily navigable waterway with a calm current, deep in places, in others flowing with low white ruffles over rocky shoals. I went to this river often, as if to a favorite relative, to see what was happening, wading and swimming…

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Speak, Rain

By Pattiann Rogers Poetry

Sound with the cries of Rachel’s children. Moan over empty hillsides and river runnels, among the broken stones of abandoned streets and fallen fences, through empty channels and sharp-ledged ravines resonant with echo. Rasp and rattle with the integrity of a perfect reckoning down the metal roof onto the splash pans of gutters, down the…

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Hail, Spirit

By Pattiann Rogers Poetry

A weaver, this spider, she plays her eight thin black legs and their needle-nail toes across the threads faster, more precisely, than a harpist at concert can pluck the strings in pizzicato. Although blind at night, she nevertheless fastens a thread to a branch of chokecherry on one side of the path, links it to…

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Manifest, by Reason of Birth

By Pattiann Rogers Poetry

Stars and the sun are not eternal. They flare. They wither. The earth and its high mountains, its tors and spires, aspen groves, scarred and broken bristlecone pines, torrential blizzards, are not eternal.                                            Rivers and seas change courses, alter shores, appear, dwindle, vanish. The rampant floras, birds, reptiles, and mammals of tropical forests…

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Fire in Freedom

By Pattiann Rogers Poetry

All action, it leaps, faster than the eye can follow, from treetip to trestle tower, from cedar roof to harvested fields, cartwheels and spins, leaps again and attacks, slithering up dead oaks and dry junipers, captures, holds close, strangles, suffocates all mouth in its consumption, gulping and swallowing entire acres of sere and withered stalks,…

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The Moss Method

By Pattiann Rogers Poetry

Most lie low, flourishing with damp, harvesting sunlight, no commotion, moss mouse-silent, even through wind and hail, stoic through motors roaring fumes, through fat-clawed bears grubbing. They can soothe the knife-edges of stones with frothy leaf by leaf of gray-green life, and burned-ground mosses cover destruction, charred stumps, trees felled and blackened. Cosmopolitan mosses likewise…

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