Anne Whitehouse
Earthly Paradise
“…in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.”
-Shakespeare, The Tempest, III, ii, 140-3.
A waterfall for every day of the year
and the water so clean I could drink
from everywhere I saw it flowing.
Mountains and ravines, a tangle
of vegetation, blue and green.
Night and day the surf beat
against the rocky shores,
and the forest was full of sounds--
leaves rustling and the sweet song
of the mountain nightingale,
an elusive bird nesting
in the hollow trunks of trees.
In the lowlands, near the river,
grapefruit hung from the trees
like golden suns,
and a young woman,
her skirt hiked above her knees,
bare-breasted, stood in the shallow river
where it ran over rocks,
washing her clothes.
It could have been a scene
that perhaps never existed,
a dream of someone’s life.
Into that life came a storm
that took everything away.
The woman I’d seen placidly washing
her clothes in a green dream
lost the blue house on the hillside
built by her husband--
all they had worked and strived for
washed away in the mudslide
after the hurricane,
when two months of rain
fell in a single day.
Desecration
I placed it like a reminder
in the corner of my computer screen;
all day I kept coming back to it:
the web cam a mile underwater
recording clouds and plumes of filth
expelled from the bowels of the earth,
convulsive, unstoppable,
polluting the soft, blue-green waters
and pure white sands
of the warm, salt sea,
its rich, teeming, varied life--
dolphins playing at dawn,
stealthy, sinuous sharks,
fish the colors of the rainbow,
vibrant corals and seaweeds,
mollusks and crustaceans,
the most magnificent birds
and intricate shells--
fouled and mired in the earth’s shit.
The very substance of our greed
come back to contaminate the world,
until the last fires of internal combustion
are quenched.
Anne Whitehouse is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Meteor Shower (Dos Madres Press, 2016). She has also written a novel, Fall Love, which was just published in Spanish translation as Amigos y amantes by Compton Press. Recent honors include 2016 Songs of Eretz Poetry Prize, 2016 Common Good Books’ Poems of Gratitude Contest, 2016 RhymeOn! Poetry Prize, 2016 F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum Poetry Prize. Her story, “Abby,” was just published in Unbroken Circle: Stories of Cultural Diversity, and her story, “Minnie Lee’s Funeral,” is published in The Avenue.
Earthly Paradise
“…in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.”
-Shakespeare, The Tempest, III, ii, 140-3.
A waterfall for every day of the year
and the water so clean I could drink
from everywhere I saw it flowing.
Mountains and ravines, a tangle
of vegetation, blue and green.
Night and day the surf beat
against the rocky shores,
and the forest was full of sounds--
leaves rustling and the sweet song
of the mountain nightingale,
an elusive bird nesting
in the hollow trunks of trees.
In the lowlands, near the river,
grapefruit hung from the trees
like golden suns,
and a young woman,
her skirt hiked above her knees,
bare-breasted, stood in the shallow river
where it ran over rocks,
washing her clothes.
It could have been a scene
that perhaps never existed,
a dream of someone’s life.
Into that life came a storm
that took everything away.
The woman I’d seen placidly washing
her clothes in a green dream
lost the blue house on the hillside
built by her husband--
all they had worked and strived for
washed away in the mudslide
after the hurricane,
when two months of rain
fell in a single day.
Desecration
I placed it like a reminder
in the corner of my computer screen;
all day I kept coming back to it:
the web cam a mile underwater
recording clouds and plumes of filth
expelled from the bowels of the earth,
convulsive, unstoppable,
polluting the soft, blue-green waters
and pure white sands
of the warm, salt sea,
its rich, teeming, varied life--
dolphins playing at dawn,
stealthy, sinuous sharks,
fish the colors of the rainbow,
vibrant corals and seaweeds,
mollusks and crustaceans,
the most magnificent birds
and intricate shells--
fouled and mired in the earth’s shit.
The very substance of our greed
come back to contaminate the world,
until the last fires of internal combustion
are quenched.
Anne Whitehouse is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Meteor Shower (Dos Madres Press, 2016). She has also written a novel, Fall Love, which was just published in Spanish translation as Amigos y amantes by Compton Press. Recent honors include 2016 Songs of Eretz Poetry Prize, 2016 Common Good Books’ Poems of Gratitude Contest, 2016 RhymeOn! Poetry Prize, 2016 F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum Poetry Prize. Her story, “Abby,” was just published in Unbroken Circle: Stories of Cultural Diversity, and her story, “Minnie Lee’s Funeral,” is published in The Avenue.