ANNOUNCING DANA WILDSMITH POET OF THE MONTH OF JULY 2011 WITH THREE POEMS

Dana Wildsmith is the author of four collections of poetry: One Good Hand Iris Press, 2005), Our Bodies Remember (The Sow’s Ear Press, 2000), Annie (Palanquin Press, 1999), and Alchemy (The Sow’s Ear Press, 1995). One Good Hand was a SIBA Poetry Book of the Year nominee. In this her birth month, she has been named Poet of the Month of July, 2011.

Wildsmith is  also the author of an environmental memoir, Back to Abnormal: Surviving with an Old Farm in the New South (MotesBooks). 

She has served as Artist-in-Residence for the Grand Canyon National Park and for The Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska, and has been a Poetry Fellow with the South Carolina Academy Of Authors. Her work is widely published in journals and anthologies, including most recently: Writing By ear (MotesBooks), Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia (University Press of Kentucky), The Southern Poetry Anthology (Texas Review Press, 2007), and Women, Period (Spinsters Ink). Wildsmith lives in Bethlehem, Georgia.    

Double-digging

Nothing so pleases as

yanking winter grass

from a squared-off plot—

untangling the earth

one hank at a time

while afternoon

rests softly on your back

and options

grit among your thought

like seeds.

August

We break a sweat brushing our teeth.

Fish-slick, who says we gave up gills?

We’re breathing, aren’t we ? The air 

six a.m. is hot water;

the sky is a slap of blue.

We wade into miasma

in t-shirts, shorts and brimmed hats,

sweat-tides already rising

at our necks and armpits and sides

where the heat needs to bubble out.

Sweet Sweat


Wouldn’t seem honest not to sweat,

like claiming bragging rights 

on two armloads of Better Boys

half a pound each with no spots

while you stand there dry as July clay.

It’s sweat proves you grew these beauts.

Sweat’s how you earn your okra;

it’s your right to sweet iced tea;

it’s your Georgia union card.

The deeper you’ve dug 

your generational toehold

into Winder’s red dirt,

Blood Mountain’s granite,

the kaolin clay under Claxton,

the more kinds of sweat

you’re able to tell apart right off--

like knowing you can hear

south Georgia scrub

in that banker’s voice,

despite he claims Atlanta).

From birth, you know underarm sweat so well

it’s hardly worth the mention;

it’s what you get lugging groceries

from car to kitchen. Spend the morning

yanking garden weeds and you get

whole-back sweat, wet neck,

sticky back-of-the-knees.

An afternoon running fence wire

adds scalp sweat to all these,

and digging post holes

puddles hot sweat in your ears.

But it’s when eyelid sweat starts to

gum your lashes that everybody knows

you’ve hauled in groceries, hoed beans,

and by god run forty more feet of fence wire.

You should sit down. Cool off. Let the sweat dry.

Have a glass of iced tea.

You’ve done an honest day’s work.


These poems from One Good Hand by Dana Wildsmith, Iris Press


http://www.danawildsmith.com/One%20Good%20Hand.htm