Lois Marie Harrod

Depression's Sonnet



No matter that the moony gourd of night
has spilled black wine into the stars,
by morning the sun will wipe it up
and the sky will come clean again as a sheet.

This is not the easy comfort I give to children
but to the dark liquid itself as it pours over me,
wait until morning, the body will find its rag
to mop the spill, the reddest wine returns to water.

But, no, this is no miracle I can guarantee
even to myself nor can I explain
the way time has become distorted,

my night lasting most of the day and the day
passing like the slipper of a small star,
I know how darkly I could die.






Lois Marie Harrod's chapbook Put Your Sorry Side Out was published by Concrete Wolf in 2005, and she won a 2003 fellowship, her third, from the New Jersey Council on the Arts for her poetry. Her sixth book of poetry Spelling the World Backward (2000) was published by Palanquin Press, University of South Carolina Aiken, which also published her chapbook This Is a Story You Already Know (l999) and her book Part of the Deeper Sea (l997). Her poems have appeared in many journals, among them American Poetry Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, American Pen, Prairie Schooner, The Literary Review, Zone 3, Green Mountains Review. Her earlier publications include the books Every Twinge a Verdict (Belle Mead Press, l987), Crazy Alice (Belle Mead Press, l991) and a chapbook Green Snake Riding (New Spirit Press, l994).





Michael P. Workman Lois Marie Harrod Joel Fry Steve Dalachinsky Aldo Tambellini Charles Frederickson Stan Dunn