Poetry by Board Member Stacy Williams

To Mother Nature: Last Wish

Mother, honor me and take me back
Call to the cougar and tell her
To find me in an aspen grove
Let her lunge at my throat and drink
Drink the blood from my heart
Tear the flesh from my thighs
And run
Run across the grassy meadows and the red-rock buttes
With my heart-meat firing her belly
Let the coyotes suck
Suck the marrow from my bones
Let my mellow butter melt
In the throats of wild dogs
Let the turkey vultures dive
Dive from the sky
Wrap me in their silken wings
Let their red faces pick at my bones
Let them fly heavy with me
Then shit me out
For the columbines and buttercups
And when the snow comes
Let my bones sink
Sink down between the swollen, silver trunks
Grant my soul peace while I mulch seedlings
And in the Spring
Let elk give birth on my grave

On Time

Time is a cruel lie
So too's the wick
They leave us panting
But pity us not
for willingly, eagerly we scamper like hamsters
strapped with our miraculously marvelously accurately
mathematically — isolated — moments
to be
divided up
filled up
expanded by invention

Off we scurry
proud of our punctiliousness
Swiss in our swiftness
fast in our fastidiousness
we're an expedition!
mounted with exactitude.

But observe
the slow shepherd stepping off
from the day the ewes lambed

Feast your eyes

on the idiot-friendly farmer
fathoming back to the days of sowing &
forward to the harvest

Simpletons, see
the circle > birth > growth >

development > death > decay >

Pity their ignorance! Ignore their inconvenience!

For everyone knows:
the past that is already dead
no longer remains present in the future
that has yet to be born.