The Shelterbelt by Rebecca Luce-Kapler

December 15, 2023
Poem title: The Shelterbelt Poet name: Rebecca Luce-Kapler Poem: For Harold If it has been a good life, full and rich, and especially if it has been lived close to the earth from which we come, there are no terrors and no yearnings . . . -Louis Bromfield, Out of the Earth Sun on distant hills of brome and purple scrub, a gibbous moon waxes, light a glass of well water bright against pruned skeletons of apple trees. Your orchard behind the windbreak, fruit in a place of more winter than spring, apricots and cherries: a weather report of living. Our conversations float in the ether, flakes of ash perturbed by the last wind. The distant croak of frogs and the sharp green of peeled bark herald the final season. A coyote echoes down the valley and a startle of magpies fly west with shining wings, a chorus for the wild edge of sorrow wrapping its music about me. End of poem. Credits and bio: Copyright © Rebecca Luce-Kapler Rebecca Luce-Kapler has published more than 50 poems in various journals and anthologies and has had her work broadcast on CBC radio. In 2020, her second poetry collection, The Negation of Chronology: Imagining Geraldine Moodie, was published.