Journey Bread – Coming Soon
JOURNEY BREAD
Happy Spring! It feels like the right time to start a journey.
Journey Bread, my sixth book, will be published by Broadstone Books in August.
Journey bread is the viaticum, the bread on the tongue of the dying. It is the journey cake my forebears carried through the mountains or baked on a flat rock in the ashes of their campfires. And it is also waybread, lembas, giving us heart in dark times.
The book is a kind of retrospective – both a celebration and a letting go of what has been, to make space for what is to come.
… sometimes late in life you turn
and see the landscape you have become
spreading out behind you
like a leaf unfolding, or a wing.
Some of the poems are revised versions of poems in earlier books. Some are new, filling gaps in the landscape of revelation.
I’d like to invite you to go with me on this journey. I’ll send an email every 2-4 weeks with a poem from the book, news, and an occasional request for your (voluntary) advice and support. If you’d like to receive this email, please sign up HERE.
You can cancel anytime; I won’t inundate you with emails; you don’t have to buy anything 🙂 and your email will never be passed on to anyone else.
Here’s the title poem from the first section of the book:
In My Grandmother’s Garden
Under the lemon leaves I went to ground.
Headless fuchsias danced en pointe,
mad hibiscus spoke to me in tongues.
At evening, unharried to bath or table,
I snail-tracked in to bed a glamour of rotting leaves
and fell to darkness, unafraid.
No motherly earwig came whispering
and sucking at the brain,
no potato bug scrabbled beside the bed,
weeping and wringing her claws
though they crawled at night
from the garage’s pale belly.
The summers floated like motes at midday,
but always they ended.
I hid in the jacaranda, or deep among orange thorns –
once, under the terrible garage.
Each year I was taken for pruning.
I wonder how I might have rooted, had I stayed.
I look forward to hearing from you. And I would greatly appreciate your forwarding this invitation to friends.
Namaste –
Ruth
ruth@ruththompson.net
ruththompson.net
https://www.facebook.com/RuthThompsonPoetandChannel
“Wrong turns, demon wrestling, love lost and found, and the ongoing revelation of belonging to the natural world.” George Ella Lyon