For Ann Forsythe Irwin Bourgois
Remembering Ann
Whose beauty began
At the crown of her head
And ran to the deep underneath
Of her feet—
Never aware of her own élan.
Now, half mad with pain,
She crawls through her rooms,
Calling for doctors,
Falling,
Forgetting,
Consumed,
Trepanned.
Ever since the world began—
Star fall
Nightfall
Bomb fall
Downfall...
Read the scan:
Every woman and every man,
Once a flowered Palestine,
Falls blindly toward the Nakba—
Bald catastrophe,
Prescription—
According to the
Plan.
Source: Poetry (September 2012).
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This poem originally appeared in the September 2012 issue of Poetry magazine
Joan Hutton Landis taught for twenty-four years at the Curtis Institute of Music, where she was chair of the Liberal Arts Department. Her first book of poems is That Blue Repair (Penstroke Press, 2008).
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