​Sister Death


My death grazes just out of sight
over my right shoulder.
I hear the whisper of green
between her lips.
I imagine her as mare
heavy with foal,
tail swishing flies from her strong back,
eyes brown as a farm pond.

Each day I toss a lump of sugar
back into that unseen pasture,
murmur soothing words under my breath.

Wherever I go she migrates with me.
Even in winter
when fodder is scarce,
I feel her warm breath on my neck
and dream of bundled hay in a heated stall.

One day in some field
neither of us has visited
I will forget to toss the sugar
or to dream of hay,
and my death will canter closer
whinnying softly until her nose 
finds my palm.

©1996 Penny Harter, from Turtle Blessing (La Alameda Press).


Turtle Blessing

After the boy threw the pregnant turtle
hard against the brick wall
of the courtyard, screaming
What are you, some kind of 
fucking humanitarian?
to the girl who called him crazy,
the creature bounced off,
crawled a few feet, blood
seeping into the weeds
from her cracked shell,
and stopped.

She died last night,
was buried, her eggs gone
with her into the earth.

This morning in the mist
by Seeley's Pond, an ancient turtle,
huge and black on the wet grass,
turns its blunt head this way, that,
as it crawls up the slope
toward the road, and I bless it
against the crunch of its dark shell,
against the driver who will not swerve.

©1996 Penny Harter, from Turtle Blessing (La Alameda Press)



Tramps


That’s what they must have been,
or what we called them, we three
little girls roaming the woods that
began at the end of our neighborhood.

We knew those woods well—where
the skunk cabbage bloomed on its
island in the creek, or where tadpoles
lurked in the deeper woodland pools.

We were getting ready to vault that creek, 
flying across on the rough poles we’d culled
from broken saplings, when we heard them
coming and soon saw them—three rough men

cutting through the underbrush and heading
toward the nearby gravel road. Young as 
we were, something told us to hide behind 
a hefty fallen trunk, duck our heads under

its branches heavy with their still green summer 
leaves. Something told us to hold our breath, 
to not move a muscle, to merge with the ferns 
around our ankles, silent in  flickering sunlight .

Those tramps passed so close beside us, 
it seemed they must surely see us, might even 
hurt us, though we did not fully understand 
the kinds of hurt they might inflict. 
 
Soon they were gone, but we stayed where
we were, each of us hidden like the roadside 
fawn who by instinct crouches down among 
tall grasses to be safe, to be safe, to be safe.