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(PROSE POEM)

VISITING ON DAVID'S BIRTHDAY

​LENORA STEELE

            --Isgonish Marsh Burying Grounds
                        for David Scott
 
The farmer in the field just over the berm is spreading manure. The gulls have settled on the upturned ground, a fox has been, her skat hardens on a fallen stone, the grasshoppers’ high pitch raises the mercury at least two degrees. Twenty or so moss eaten limestones stand over the bones if there are still bones; buried here on a marsh two centuries ago it is hard to say what remains. Some of the names do, if you take the time to trace the etchings with your finger, scrape the hardened centuries of moss with a stick or a little jackknife if you should happen to have one along. Some of the dates are terrible sad, infants and children, mothers and brothers, young fathers but the sorrow has been picked clean now by time or little birds. The stories turned to sediment. The afternoon thickens with mosquitoes, the wind is sitting this one out. The farmer goes around and around while the gulls rise and fall...strange winged fruit. The locusts burn with desire.

Lenora Steele's poetry and short prose have been published in Canada, Ireland, and the US, in: The Fiddlehead, Wow, The Antigonish Review, and Room, among others. She lives where twice a day the tidal bore funnels a hundred billion tonnes of brine up the Bay of Fundy into the Cobequid Bay & the Salmon River reaching her home in Truro, Nova Scotia, Canada.
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