Letter Eight
Place was that piece of ground between house and swing,
yielding to the foot,
covered with reddened strawberry leaves
and that small vine that isn’t wintergreen.
Among the cedars, some of them struggling still like old limbo dancers,
covered with a lighter green lichen,
there on the day that William Faulkner died I came and stood
and even if I had not willed it so, down my head would have gone down,
thinking definitely about something:
God, how I love this little part of ground.
Colleen Thibaudeau, 1974
“Letter Eight” is from Colleen Thibaudeau’s elegiac sequence Ten Letters (1975) available from Brick Books. The Ten Letters sequence also appears in The Artemesia Book (1991).
((( ο ))) Listen to Jean McKay read “Letter Eight” here: https://audioboom.com/posts/886698-jean-mckay-reads-letter-eight-by-colleen-thibaudeau-from-the-artemesia-book-poems-selected-and-new
