Sorrow-Dog, Blood was Red Missississippi Daybreak:

by Lynn Strongin

noon butter-yellow as Iowa
all the wheat waving, by night inked over.

Chalk storms
blew
obliterating Kansas farms.

Strife
struck the family
misfortune like July lightning after a day made in heaven, blue ingot pouring voltage of cobalt:

            Forked, it struck: Astounding us lulled into illusive calm:
            Angling over Quaker wheat, Shaker barn
            burning the whole design in the brain
                                                            before bringing the loft & news, the mews of wrought iron
all the way down
to Cinder Town.

Lynn Strongin’s “Audubon Wallpaper” is a part of her memoir Indigo. In 2006, the University of Iowa Press will publish her anthology The Sorrow Psalms: A Book of Twentieth Century Elegy . She also has two chapbooks of poems coming out in 2006: Dovey & Me (Solo Press) and The Birds of the Past Are Singing (Cross-Cultural Communications, New York).

from Epileptic Projections