Grandmother's Milk, Details and Sample Pages
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Penny Harter
Grandmother's Milk
Singular Speech Press, Canton, Connecticut, 1995. Book Design by William J. Higginson 5¼ x 8¼", 44 pages, perfect bound, $7.
ISBN 1-880286-23-8
"Perfect poems are rare. In Penny Harter's Grandmother's Milk, I encountered such poems. Harter is a master wordsmith." ~ Soichi Furuta
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18—Penny Harter
FOR THE CREW OF THE
SPACE SHUTTLE CHALLENGER
Where have they gone?
A fragment of bone and flesh
stuck to a blue sock
is strained from cold Atlantic waters
before it can become bait.
It will be analyzed.
Did they all wear blue socks?
Which families scramble
through drawers and hampers
looking for the hole
where blue socks used to be?
We ae compelled to confirm
life or death,
claim our own for burial.
We must hold the fragment in our palm,
close our hand on it,
this dear dear piece of the beloved
who wanted to see Earth's body
from far enough away
to make it whole.
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Grandmother's Milk—35
A MIRACLE
One is around here somewhere.
Perhaps in the little white box
empty of all save the tiny
soiled rectangle of cotton
a miracle will appear
perfect as a polished grain
of mustard seed.
There is always a miracle
when you need one.
The scratch on your cheek
heals.
The two-day-old milk
does not turn
and foul the carton
with its smell.
This morning, for instance,
you woke up.
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40—Penny Harter
NO ENEMY
There is no enemy among the roses
beside our sidewalk though their petals
shrivel brown like dried blood
in the slant winter sun.
And there is no enemy
in the black ice that hides
on our street after twilight rain.
Only the long sigh of the wind
tells us that night is coming
over the hills like a train
with no eyes, whistling faintly
from so far away
we can't tell if that stain
around it in the sky is smoke
or angels.
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"A
Miracle" first appeared in The Price of Admission, published by From Here Press, 1986, and was reprinted as a broadside published by the New Jersey
State Council for the Arts in connection with the Arnold Gingrich Memorial Award, 1988.
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This page first posted 23 September 2003 and
last updated 23 January 2008. Copyright © 1986, 1995, 2003-2008 Penny Harter. All
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