Selected Work

          by Glenda Bailey-Mershon









          Piedmont After Botticelli, 1959


          I have loved the taste of plums.
          On a porch gazing out at River Falls,
          Caesar's Head, an adult
          Reached over my book,
          Handed me a purple fruit,
          Said, Taste, and I did,
          Juice exploding
          My tongue like a thousand bees
          Making honey just for me.
          Sugared purple merged with swirling blue
          Sun glinting water mountains gazing
          Back like all gods rolled
          Into one voluptuous Spirit.

          I saw before me, Tuscany:
          Sunlit splendor, Umbria
          Naming colors
          Orchard fresh
          Cold marble stirred to life
          Venus stepping from her shell
          Clothed in breezes soft as
          Rich lingering velvet
          Pouring out slow glory
          Over stubbled fields.
          Brunelleschi's domes aglitter
          Among the barns.

          For a moment, on a Carolina
          Porch, I tasted
          Italy and life
          Resembled art.
          Now, forty years from then,
          Juiced with ginned-over
          Memory, I eat
          Plums amid Burnt Sienna
          Blooms, my modest hills
          Landscapes dipped in honey.

          TWO SHORT POEMS FOR THE COSMOS


          1.

          What are we, but
          Cunningly organized particles
          Stirred by whatever
          Tickles or disrupts?
          Or strings, perhaps strings,
          vibrating out into the spheres
          Where some force,
          For want of better pastimes--yanks?

          We pray, lift voices in psalms,
          Pulsing joy, anger, quasars
          Speeding up toward destruction.

          Permanent or not.
          Maybe some parallel
          World awaits, magnetic arm
          Thrust out from a tear
          So deep no one,
          No thing returns.

          But what if
          All paths disintegrate
          Toward ecstasy?
          Trajectories
          Stretching to Starfields
          awakening
          Tiny Gods
          Bursting forth in spasms
          Of delight?

          2.

          Son pours out constellations of Cheerios
          Into his milky bowl,
          Spoon to mouth like black hole stirring stars.
          Around his place a galactic army,
          soldiers on important missions, monsters
          offering heroes a chance to shine. Outside
          Our sun-smeared window,
          Sunlight striking Earth.

          His face a perfect sun of innocence.

          If you could choose,
          Would you
          Be plucked
          Or stirred?

          Glenda Bailey-Mershon's poetry has appeared in journals, most recently in Appalachian Heritage, and inĘtwo chapbooks, sa-co-ni-ge/blue smoke: poems from the Southern Appalachians (Jane's Stories, 2005) and Bird Talk (Wild Dove, 2000). She teaches writing in community workshops and edited three volumes of Jane's Stories anthologies. Her interest in local history and writer's lives has resulted in numerous interviews that appear online and in various archives. She is now at work on a novel set in small-town Georgia among people who choose everyday between truth and hypocrisy. (April 09)