Poem by Jane Stuart
Smiling sunlight dashes windowpanes
of foreign cars. The road is exquisite;
it stretches to eternity
and never winds outside a tunneled mound.
Streetlights, traffic accidents, the knot
of easy tourists with cameras hanging
on their arms
block the view a guidebook said
to look for.
But the response the horse makes,
keeping time beside gray buses,
anchors the unknown
and fills our life today with what was old.
When the moon shines and day sleeps,
we stay inside the wind that holds to night.
An unheard word, a honking,
flashing light, a dented bumper
finish what was modern; or was old.
The road is not to be remembered
and is there to be remembered
like a locket wrapped around
an alabaster neck. But the statue’s wisdom
was foretold us — it is only memory
kept in two albums
that record this time.
JANE STUART lives in a family home in Greenup, Kentucky, that is now in the middle of a nature preserve. Her writing interest is poetry — traditional forms (cinquain, sonnet, villanelle, haiku, tanka) and some free verse. She enjoys making bread, doing counted cross-stitch, making cross-stitch quilt tops, and observing nature.
Finalist for the 2013 Luminaire Poetry Award
