Pruning Burning Bushes

By Sarah M. Wells

In pruning, a decision must be made whether to "either slowly hollow, heartwood rotting outward, / or grow from green into a fiery blaze in autumn." Pruning Burning Bushes is a collection of poems that explores the intersection of the natural and spiritual worlds with the personal and familial worlds. The book wrestles with this decision--to grow or to rot. Walking from the valley to the highest summit and back down into the depths of the canyon riverbed, the poems travel through the author's childhood filled with family and farm life, new marriage life, and subsequent miscarriages, the births of her children and deaths of relatives, and walking in the quiet waters of faith, sometimes raging and sometimes rejoicing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Jun 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781630879136

Sarah M. Wells

Sarah M. Wells is the author of five books: American Honey, The Family Bible Devotional Volumes 1 and 2, and two collections of poems: Between the Heron and the Moss and Pruning Burning Bushes. Six of her essays have been listed as Notable in Best American Essays. She lives with her husband and three children in Ashland, Ohio.

Book preview

9781620323304.kindle.jpg

Pruning Burning Bushes

Poems by Sarah M. Wells

Pruning Burning Bushes

Copyright © 2012 Sarah M. Wells. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf & Stock, 199 W. 8th Ave., Eugene, OR 97401.

Wipf & Stock

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

isbn 13: 978-1-62032-330-4

eisbn 13: 978-1-63087-913-6

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgment to the following journals where these poems, sometimes in earlier versions, first appeared:

Alimentum, My Mother’s Kitchen

Ascent, Cascade Valley

Christianity & Literature, Dent de Lion and A Christmas Poem

Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Hymn of Skin

Literary Mama, The ladies’ quilting club is out today,

Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry, Sifted As Wheat

The New Formalist, Singing Birds

New Ohio Review, Making the Bed

Nimrod: International Journal of Prose and Poetry, Interference and Rain Dance

Poetry East, Casa Blanca Lily

Poetry for the Masses, Junction

r.kv.r.y, Daylily

Relief: A Christian Literary Expression, Pruning Burning Bushes

Rock & Sling, Honky-Tonk Bride

The Table (Ashland Theological Seminary newsletter), Thunder

Windhover: A Journal of Christian Literature, Angry

Angry, previously titled, The Angry Gardener, received honorable mention in the Akron Art Museum’s New Words 2009 Poetry Contest.

Several poems included in this manuscript were originally published in a limited-edition chapbook, Acquiesce, published by Finishing Line Press in March, 2009.

Nothing is yet in its true form.

—C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

for Brandon

and for Lydia, Elvis, and Henry

Cascade Valley

Look, my daughter, the pine tree

dropped its seeds, and here

a fragile sapling braves the forest floor.

This used to be a birch tree

but lightning sliced it, wind heaved

its heavy breath and now

the trunk is rust. Sticks once flared

skirts of springtime buds,

but now we throw the broken limbs

into rushing floodwaters

to see how quickly we could be carried

away. Always a hair too close

to the edge, pebbles skitter

into the river. Let’s find our way

back from this spring rage, out of the valley

that catches what used to cling

above. Climb this mountain

with its tread marks, hoof prints,

decomposing oaks—we are not the first

to grow and fall. But see the way

the leaves return to earth, the way the dust

collects? Crocus blades emerge

from crumbling stumps as if this growth

does not take more than soil,

light, and rain. Reach down, my child,

bring