Support Poetry Flash's year-round literary programs, events, and publishing.
Ruth Thompson
Lunar Eclipse, June 2012
Floats across my inner light
a string of clotted shadows—
dredged up, exposed, released,
again dredged up, from farther
and farther
inland until the rock itself
cracks, the mineral self
exposed: the way a river
I used to know
had to be dredged
each year, again and again—
raw cut-throat
gravel, ancient footprints,
fossil tribolytes,
sludge, scat, fool’s gold.
Downstream are wide
bays of light,
broad reaches shining.
Now let all the unforgiven selves
one by one appear
in their striped prison clothes—
bring them to the river
and wash them, wash them clean.
Ruth Thompson recent book of poetry, in a new and revised edition, is Woman with Crows. Among her honors are the New Millennium Writings Poetry Award and the Harpur Palate Milton Kessler Memorial Award. Her chapbook, Here Along Cazenovia Creek, was the basis for a poetry and dance collaboration with the Japanese dancer Shizuno Nasu. Ruth Thompson lives in Hilo, Hawaii.
Ruth Thompson reads with Don Mitchell for Books on Stage in Cloverdale, California, on November 6, 2014, and with Tania Pryputniewicz and Michelle Wing in the Poetry Flash reading series at Moe’s Books in Berkeley, California, on November 11, 2014.