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A Glance Back
By Sandy Karng

Our farm was one field to the east
of the old railroad track.
Flat as a pancake that land was,
but we still say the house was on a hill.

What I remember:
A woman's hand uplifted in greeting
or in warning.
The blurred motion of a person passing
through a doorway, a lacy window,
the garden, the Rose-of-Sharon.
Why, there may even have been some shrieks of laughter
from the barn.

I recall murmurous teasing voices,
garbled, confused with wind rippling,
the lambs bleating, wormwood, gentian, primary rocks
and the sky, the sky!
Transporting us to opulent places of abandonment.
Places where silver pike were milting,
the amrita-manna was flowing, and thinking
how it was enough that we were alive.
Were breathing.
And responsible
even for the rotation of the earth.


Sandy Karng
Sandy Karng is a mountain woman, having spent the last 23 winters living in a little cabin with an outhouse 9,253 feet high in the Colorado Rockies in the town of Ward - population 169.

She shares her life with one blue-eyed husband, one blue-eyed cat and is the mother of a daughter. Sandy likes to walk in the woods and climb the mountains, and she holds a black belt in the art of survival.

Sandy has been working in public radio for nineteen years as an on-air music programmer/deejay at KGNU-Boulder. She is a professional voiceover and enjoys leather-smithing, mycology, doll-making and traveling around the world. She spends a part of each year living in Puttaparthi, India.

She is the author of two books of poetry: I Pledge Allegiance To The Rainbow (1976) and Live From LaVerne's (1990), and is presently working on a third.

Sandy can be reached via email at: prema9@juno.com

 
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