“the piddly brook of my soul” – Renée Nicole Macklin

Saturday I walked for my third “visibility event” after the killing of Renée Nicole Macklin Good, mother and poet. Her award-winning poem, “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs,” sparked this:

By the River

I’ve read the good books, trying

to decipher syllable by syllable, dissecting

sound & meaning. It doesn’t work

for me, a timepiece measuring soul which

wants to slip downslope, merge with

melt of ice much farther up the mountain –

the sublime vista – but headed down

in spite of it all, nourishing a chickadee

meadow on its way, down thru a hot-

as-hell burned landscape of dead trees;

caught, damned I thought by a dam,

water roughed and fought over

by legal pounds of flesh while the blood,

like water, like the trickle of soul,

desires to flow free, merge in the great sea.

~ Taylor Graham