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