blue skies poetry

creek ducks the boundary fence
leaves it slackjawed & dangling
spring     the cattle


wallow in runoff mud
play their spines along the wire


up the coulee 
ironstone peters to cactus
wild lupine


the onions are found
by scent      bite
of trodden leaves
    bulbs unearthed like molars
    crepuscular canyon light


wild taste of
earth & dark water


coyote on a lip of land     ochre
moon saddling predawn sky

~ Jenna Butler

Jenna Butler is an educator, book reviewer, editor and poet. Her work has won a number of awards and has been widely published in literary magazines, journals and anthologies in North America and Europe. She has edited nineteen collections of poetry in Canada and England, and is currently working toward a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of East Anglia, UK. Her new collection of poems, Forcing Bloom, is scheduled for release by Mercutio Press in 2007. Butler lives in Edmonton, Alberta with her husband, where she is the founding editor of Rubicon Press.

Filed under: Jenna Butler, Writing the Land by akublik Date 2 October, 2007