YOU, WALKING OUT OF THE ASHES

A gray specter, you're picking your way out of the ashes
and asking me to dance. (Why is the metaphor always dance?)

My skirt is singed, heavy with smoke and my hair soot-black,
but I reach out, taking the ash-silvered rose from your hand,

clenching it between my teeth so I can angle my body
close to yours while we glide one more tango.

Our steps — slow, quick-quick, slow — are muffled by cinders,
yet we're brazen and others, shamed by our filth, avert their eyes.

Was it only this morning I fed dogs, pruned roses, pulling
away from you, from your Brioni suit and the diamond choke-chain

anchored around my neck? Beware, Grimm tales always say,
of what you wish for. Well, today my third wish (the wasted one)

came true. And, still, I ask you one more time:
go back to Monday, forget your briefcase, slip your necktie-noose

and dance with me here before towers of light, hold me against
your two-beat heart before the world catches fire,

(Why has the metaphor become fire?) before the surreal
turns real and before your fingerbones beckon.

AFGHANISTAN: HOW THEY SURVIVE

In the desolate village of Qhurqul
On the broad Shamali Plains,
The enemy has cut down grape vines, walnut
And mulberry trees, felled the apple orchards.
And Amir? He has returned to a well
Dammed with rocks,
A house turned to rubble by mortar fire.

What has he salvaged? A tin box, a chair,
A tub without a bottom.
Now, in the char of the old kitchen,
He and his family camp out.
They have no grapes, no nuts or bright berries,
No apples to eat, but they do keep warm
Slowly burning what they have lost.

911 NARRATION

The planes are overhead
As the narration reels on and on.
Smoke rises up.
The profile of this narration is alien and unforgiving.
Then narration makes a U-turn and flees
Keening, insistent:
Today all narration turns fugitive.

FALLEN LIGHT

The mile-long breakers threaded north-south
thump against the western shore.

An afternoon of little wind and the shook foil
of water is sparked by a thousand fallen suns.

In their brilliance, I try to measure September's
failing days, anxious to hold them and seine

agates, shells, ancient sandollar fossils
roiling invisibly below the surf.

Never assume, I remind myself kneeling on iceplant,
because all beauty is promised to darkness

as quartz and granite are ground to sand,
so lives erode beneath breakers and fallen light;

yet, when the sun is low, even a single grain of sand
casts an angular, heart-stopping shadow.

RUNES, A Review Of Poetry is a new annual poetry anthology edited by poets CB Follett and Susan Terris. The first issue featured poems by Jane Hirshfield, Martha Rhodes, David St. John, Ronald Wallace, Richard Wilbur, Eleanor Wilner, and many other fine poets known and unknown.

We believe RUNES has everything a good book should have: comedy, tragedy, satire, drama. There are poems of love, sorrow, pain, laughter. Poems about nature, children, men & women, birth and death. There are poems that rhyme and ones in free verse, lyric poems and narrative ones. Our good friend and advisor David St. John said that this anthology reads like "a survey of the best of everything going on in contemporary American poetry." He went on to say: "Truly astonishingly beautiful, and the work is superb! It's a knock out beginning to end."