So Forth - Poems

With irony, in mourning tinged with eros, So Forth blends the personal and the political to meditate on damage, aging, and injustice. The poems surge back in memory, pondering guilt and forgiveness. Consciousness flows from singular to plural; identity in these poems does a round dance with other personae, with formidable women artists of the past, with pre-Socratic philosophers, with lovers, children, and strangers-the strangest of whom is the face in the mirror. In response to griefs both historical and contemporary, So Forth contemplates the quest for the holy and the traditions of the sacred.

From "For Chiara"
. . . Do we stop seeing
when we walk away? The brook prattles on.
Home's far off. Dusk settles, slowly, among leaves.
That's not mercy, scattering from its hands.