Out from the Epicenter – a poem by Phoebe Marrall

Out from the Epicenter

A turbulence of earthquakes
has etched rivers through
my stucco plains.

Its engravings thread,
lightning forms, from the
epicenter out into vastness.

Not until some determined
handyman caulks them white
will they dry up.

And where they disappear
will flow other rivers,
long in new courses.

The daddy longlegs and
trestle builders will direct them,
and replenish my plains.

Phoebe Marrall, orphaned at the age of nine, was a survivor of The Depression and of a grueling childhood. When she died in 2017 at the age of eighty-four, her daughters Jane Hendrickson and Camille Komine inherited hundreds of poems she had written. They remained unpublished during her lifetime, but it is the intention of her daughters that a collection be compiled for readers to appreciate. Relief, Have You a Name? is currently a work in progress, being edited by Gayle Jansen Beede.