WORLD VOICES

THIS IS THE ONE WHO WILL LEAVE
  BY KERRY HARDIE


Contents

Home
Introduction
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Thrush
Last Swim of the Day
Negation
The Satin Gown
October
Protecting the Buds
She Will Try Again to
     Recover Again

The Rough and the Smooth
A man died in the valley
     today,

What Happened to the
     Soviet Union

After the Prize
Porcelain Man
Being Here
Fear
On Reading Michael
     Longley's Snow Water

Reflection
Waning
Emigration Photo
California
Letter from the Old World
     to a Brother in the New

Sky
Domestic War
Grace
Freda Kahlo Goes Native
All Saints

World Voices Home

The Literary Explorer
Writers on the Job
Books Forgotten
Thomas E. Kennedy
Walter Cummins
Web Del Sol



Grace

At the station,
the rain is over, it is before
the rain.

Sky, then ash trees, then
hawthorn, rowan, elder.
Cow parsley, wild carrot, chervil.
All in full flower.
The scent dredges down
through the wet air
like icing sugar from a sifter.
It dissolves on touch with the warm earth,
runs off in little puffs
like breath.
Sunday morning. People waiting: the farmers
in caps, their wives in stout shoes, their young
in new trainers.
They stand under
this rain of invisible fragrance.
There is something
unearthly about it. Like the fragrance
from the body of a saint.
Flowering grasses grow between the sleepers.
The rain comes again. Not cold, whitening the sky.
All the little curling fronds
of opening leaves in the straight clean rain.
And the quiet people waiting.