Judith Laura: Contradance
Not squares, they stand in long lines waiting for the call. Women
and men at times outrageously proper but more often sedately improper, greeting
neighbors, trail buddies and even lost cousins on the way to the top or bottom
where improper roles reverse.
Swingers all, they swirl and spin, balanced for an instant. Afloat
a fiddle tune hand grasps hand, clutches waist quicker than a breath as faces
blur and thought departs leaving dancers riding the cresting wave of the
unchained flow and laughing.
Copyright 1996, 2000 by
Judith Laura. All rights reserved. Published in Pudding Magazine #30 (June
1996)
Judith Laura: Autumn
A leaf lone high up in mid-air rolls green edge over brown, yet
never falls, sustained by a spider’s strand invisible
to me.
Copyright 2003 by Judith
Laura. All Rights reserved. Published in The Mid-America Poetry Review,
Summer-Autumn 2003 Vol.IV, No.2
The Jeweler's Daughter
The jeweler's daughter
dislikes diamonds,
disdaining their colorless chill.
If she must wear a ring, she chooses instead passionate
amethyst fiery red garnet sea deep blue topaz genuine jade.
But even more she treasures pebbles from the park: obsidian,
tigereye, shale, agate, mica and flint, feldspar, rosequartz, pumice, azurite,
fluorite and prase and best of all, soft black coal with which she can draw from
life.
Judith Laura: Elegy
She paused between the Torah and the Buddha and changed her
name to the Spanish for to be. Cursing the knife that scraped love's laugh from
her bloody insides to satisfy custom she bled no more.
She cried between the circle and the cross between, they
whispered, male and female yet found there not conflict but union.
Discounting the gold that flowed to her, no devotee of
Mammon, she planted it where none could see it grow.
She hid between the pinnacle and the pentacle barren,
refusing to pluck the hair from her chin or shave the shadow from her soul.
Witch, they called her and so might she be for she gave to children
thrice the good she got.
She rests amid light from moon and star coasting on the wind
of sky and sea and claims her name, the Spanish for
to be.
Copyright 1998, 2000 by
Judith Laura. All rights reserved.
Published in Prayers to
Protest (Pudding House 1998)
Alma Mater
Ohio, Athena 1963
Freemont
poems