Bethlehem in Minneapolis
The deer cast long shadows
on the pasture fence;
with three crowned heads,
they are wise creatures walking to the city
for the birth of a necessary miracle.
There is a murmuration of starlings
pointing fingers east.
The wind blows the alder’s branches
towards a war in crowded places.
Boots and guns are moving
through distant streets.
Far away a father hides a small girl
in a toy box; she lies next
to a raveled bear.
Her door is kicked in by masked men;
her mother turns up beseeching palms.
In the window a needful star
lifts too late.
Was this the child?
I pick up the phone in the night.
There is a vast web of connecting whispers
far away. It links building to building
and home to home.
I hear voices say
She is gone.
They were here.
Hide. This
is where they are now.
Because She Cannot Speak
(for Renee Good)
Tonight the rain drips in threads
from the barn gutters;
a silent crow sits on a post.
I am black as the neighbor’s rooster
that crows at midnight.
Poems rise slow from the wet ground;
they are Renee’s, another poet
lost.
My husband says she deserved it.
Outside the kitchen window
his bleak heart whistles up
his beloved collie, herding the sheep.
I see him lately
with the eyes of the ewe
that died in childbirth.
He asks why I always call
her “a mother”;
I say her children left at school
are all our children.
In the night hours, feeding a lamb,
I think that Renee
nursed every creature she could.
Lately, I feel the moment she died.—
I can no longer fully love.
Since then, I’ve been dark
as the bottom of a grave,
cruel as the bullet in the air
broken as her shattered face.
If the Center Does Not Hold
The snow is late this year. The farm is on
a soft rise, and deep drifts form over
the hay bales. The sheep crowd in the shelter;
the long pastures are full of nothing but wind.
The roads here are closed, but the black
highway stays clear. In the city smoke and fog
rise above the city lights, and grey sheets of rain
fall endlessly.
I’ve been reading the news;
there are missiles off Ukraine’s shore,
there will be no brokered peace.
All night I’m awake, listening to the wolves
call back and forth across the dark.
The power went out after breakfast;
for a moment I imagined an immense blast,
a broken mirror of sky, the reverberating sound.
I thought about radiation and then death at a crawl.
If it comes, we said we’d seal the garage door
and sit in the car in each other’s arms, listening
to the engine hum. With my last breath
I want to hold my husband’s face in my hands
like a prayer, and wind my fingers
through his coarse beard.
I imagine I’ll hear the rock doves calling
as his heart ticks down, and the
untroubled night falls.
We’ll walk the long pastures
and leave the snow undisturbed.
Kristin Roedell graduated from Whitman College (B.A. English 1984) and the University of Washington Law School (J.D. 1987). Her poetry has been published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Switched on Gutenberg, and Ginosko. She is the author of Girls with Gardenias, (Flutter Press, 2012), Downriver, (Aldrich Press, 2015) and Lessons in Buoyancy (Poetry Box Press, 2026). Her chapbook The Rural Road is forthcoming from Farm Girl Press. She lives on a farm with six cats, fifteen sheep, and an arthritic border collie. Her website can be found at kristinroedell.wikidot.com .
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