More Deborah Digges' Poems

                    ~Prayer Flags in the Wind~

Free of the moon's collusion,

I feel like an abandoned

lover. ~ Deborah Digges

___________________

FOR SYLVIA PLATH

She gave birth here,
which is to own the land
like these cliff trees, so black and hard
and efficient, closed
to anything but fire.
She had two children, worked
between feedings, and kept two gardens,
one simply for flowers.
They must still root somewhere
on these hillsides the way seeds can be carried for years
by the thermals on the muddied
wings of insects, in the wool blown
free of the thickets,
in the hooves of cattle,
in the feces of migrating birds.
Now Devon greens in April,
even the chimneys, the reddish-blue clay
and stone, the timber
of the houses, while over the grass the clouds
outrun their shadows to the sea,
as if the earth turns too quickly, let go
from the hand of the air,
as if the sod must feel its way
closer to the rock
against such wind that blinds
enough to see these pastures given, hedge
by higher hedge, to sunlight.

Deborah Digges

______________________

Painting By Number

Deborah Digges

There was the farmer

who would not come to the front door,

his face already jaundiced, luminous,

as if death were light inside him.

He’d bring a picture as payment

saying it was his hobby now that he was

dying to paint what he’d never seen.

________________________

There is no way of telling people that they are all

walking around shining like the sun. ~Thomas Merton

                                                 ~Prayer Flags Laughing in the Wind~