Question
for Barbara Schaff
How do you paint air?
Presence that announces itself
by what it is not,
the moonlight floating
in the ocean or a hawk
tracing the currents in slow arcs?
It drapes the shoulders of a woman
bent over her garden, fills
the empty glass on the windowsill.
It announces itself on a pond
splashing its yellows and greens.
It renders tempests,
in hot indigos and purples
racing above the bay,
holds blades of light
falling like sheet metal
on the rock-studded shore.
How do you paint air?
Think of tatters of smoke hanging
over streets after a war,
the sky weeping.
Besides writing books, Marguerite Guzman Bouvard has spent her life volunteering on behalf of social justice. She has been writing to a black prisoner in Lincoln Nebraska, helping him with his poetry, and has published a chapbook of his work called Soul Songs. We need to know that our prisons are filled with mostly black and Latino prisoners, many of whom made only minor offenses. Her new poetry book is Shades of Meaning and she is working on a non-fiction book, Climate Visionaries Around the World. She will have a new poetry book coming out in 2023. Marguerite supports the Mississippi Center for Justice.
