New Poetry by Lisa Creech Bledsoe

Message From the Center of the Universe

- for Burley Creech

Lightning-flash. I see a man

with rugged hands at the pasture gate

who loves me, loved me, is gone, still

goes on. So many of us

were the only one & special favorite of 

a man guiding, building fires

under stars, deer going to ground

and his wiry, strong arms around

me. I remember a man at night

when I stood in tears who gathered

me in, brought me home, sang

and made the garden dirt, crushed weeds

& tobacco smoke sweet with story

and I knew a man in my dream—

younger somehow but known, leaping stone

to clean stone, laughing, gone. I knew

a man cracking nuts by the hurricane lamp

& the poems he told, the notes he slipped

folded into my coat. I climbed

in dusty barns, leapt down, swung out

on the rope and dropped into a dark river

dreaming below sycamore and oak, corn silver

under the lightning-bug night and a

walking stick by an empty chair, a man

stoking the woodstove who loves me,

loved me, is gone, still goes on.

- © Lisa Creech Bledsoe 2021

Student of weeds and crows, Lisa Creech Bledsoe is a hiker, beekeeper, and writer living in the Western North Carolina mountains. She has two books of poetry, Appalachian Ground (2019), and Wolf Laundry (2020), and poems out in Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Softblow, Waterwheel Review, Otoliths, and Lammergeier, among others. She can be found online at AppalachianGround.com