Blind Curse

On this modest break, I'll be stepping away from blogging to focus more time and energy on writing poems. I'm on a productive streak, and I will do whatever I can to keep it going. I'll check back in here when I've written the next Pushcart Prize-winning poem.

Today I also received my contributor copy of Kansas City Voices, Vol. 14. This issue contains a lot of impressive poems and artworks, and I'm honored to have one of my own poems published inside. If you like supporting artists and small presses, consider buying a copy for someone you like. If you hate artists and independent publishers, please buy a copy for someone you despise. The spite will really come through when the despised person opens his mailbox to your angry parcel.

As we push forward to comfortable and joyous family gatherings, I hope you'll appreciate this poem by Simon Ortiz.

Happy Thanksgiving.

"Blind Curse"

You could drive blind
for those two seconds
and they would be forever.
I think that as a diesel truck
passes us eight miles east of Mission.
Churning through the storm, heedless
of the hill sliding away.
There isn’t much use to curse but I do.
Words fly away, tumbling invisibly
toward the unseen point where
the prairie and sky meet.
The road is like that in those seconds,
nothing but the blind white side
of creation.  

                    You’re there somewhere,
a tiny struggling cell.
You just might be significant
but you might not be anything.
Forever is a space of split time
from which to recover after the mass passes.
My curse flies out there somewhere,
and then I send my prayer into the wake
of the diesel truck headed for Sioux Falls
one hundred and eighty miles through the storm.

- by Simon Ortiz, from After and Before the Lightning (1994)