DON'T LEAVE HUNGRY - Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review fell open in my hands yesterday when I brought in the mail.
It's my contributor's copy. It's feast of poetry collected by the press from the late 1950s to the present, edited by James Smith and with a forward by Billy Collins, published at the University of Arkansas Press.
Turning the pages, reading favorite poems by many of my friends down through the years was like going to reunion.
The anthology is arranged by decades. For the section of the 1980's my poem "Grass" was chosen.
GRASS by Nancy Simpson
We ought to be thankful it grows wild
on roadbanks, sometimes blond and curled.
It holds earth together and still
we hear Earth is falling.
Sink holes in the south swallow cars.
We do not doubt, but can we help wonder
what happens when the bottom drops?
Maybe clumps fall with he Jeep
and the Porsche, forming the shoreline
of a lake, in some posh suburb.
Grass has a right to be cherished,
Crowning Glory, clipped to perfection.
No matter where we sleep we live
with threat hanging over our lawns.
Who says we need more weapons?
We want to know what will happen to grass,
grass everywhere, amber savannahs,
sacred as the hair on our heads.
