Monday Poems: "Mud" - by Amy Hale Auker

Give me mud,
heavy black fragrant,
goldfish harbor
at the bottom of a trough.

Give me cows,
bawling cumbersome social,
daughters and sons and families of cows.

Give me light,
flickering non-electric intimate,
lantern light creating a small circle of us.

Give me solitude
days of books and truth and pages
when the story is the thing.

Give me simple
and wet
and real
an abundance of time.

Keep your diamonds,
your malls,
your exhaust fumes,
your schedules,
your rush,
your busy-ness,
your prescriptions,
your clean.

Give me mud,
heavy black fragrant,
goldfish harbor
at the bottom of a trough.

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Amy Hale Auker writes and rides on a ranch in Arizona. She writes "about the real world where things grow up out of the ground, where the miracle of life happens over and over and over again, where people can and do survive without malls or Arby's."

Her collection, Rightful Place, is available at www.amyhaleauker.com.