Slow Work Quaking Aspen, Populus Tremuloides. One, yet many, sprung from a single seed like the 80,000 year-old forest sprawling across a Utah plateau, the Trembling Giant. Briefly emptied of fixed notions—who I am, you are, as cracked eggs spill yokes and stargazer lilies pollen, change (a word that can mean trouble) comes to us as storms do to fields. If forgiveness is a flower, then mercy is the meadow it grows in. With tears to see through and spit to name our pain (we are, after all, mostly water) and harrowed as thatched soil. Suppled, we may welcome others, even our various selves.
Rhett Watts is a member of the 4×4 poet and artist collaborative in Worcester and facilitates writing workshops in CT and MA. Her books are: Willing Suspension (Antrim House Books) and The Braiding (Kelsay Books). She won the Rane Arroyo chapbook contest for No Innocent Eye. Her work appears in Best Spiritual Writing 2000 and she has poems in journals including Canary, SWIMM, Spoon River Poetry, The Worcester Review, Sojourners Magazine, The Windhover, and many others.
Amethyst Review 