Page 60 - WTP Vol. IX #10
P. 60
MiChaeL thuRston
Plague Year April Morning
Pause here on the well-worn path.
While doves mourn, the buried mad
rise in their terraces behind your back. Before you, runnels gnaw the rucked-up mud, puddles observe a sickly sky. Birds glean, desperate, in the furrowed field
whose rows, long parallels, run on,
never meeting, to the far-off feet
of trees and their abrupt end.
Walk on, pilgrim, hoping that you’ll meet no one. The river murmurs to itself.
We’re all a little touched from not touching. We’re all attentive to our health. Take (a test) one deep and chilling breath.
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Thurston’s most recent book is Houses from Another Street, a novel (Levellers Press, 2019). Other books include Reading Postwar British and Irish Poetry and The Underworld in Twentieth-Century Poetry: From Pound and Eliot to Heaney and Walcott. He has also co- authored a poetry chapbook, The Tibetan for Bada Bing. A recipient of Smith College’s Sherrerd Prize for Distinguished Teaching, he is currently the college’s Provost and Dean of Faculty. His work has pre- viously appeared in The Woven Tale Press Vol. VI #1 and Vol VI #7
