The humble earthworm,
my science teacher said,
cutting through its soft body
with no backbone,
showing us the segments.
Annelida. His thick fingers,
stained with nicotine,
pulled off its cocoon
for eggs—clitellum.
We girls stared—disgusted—
as the boys pulled more
from the plastic bag,
tearing the bodies apart
between them.
Today, in a different land,
rain’s driven them up
from winter’s burrows
to bird beaks. Dropped:
stunned on the sidewalk,
stretched out like
swollen matchsticks,
drying in a strong wind.
The robins are hunting
the grass for fresher ones
and I look away, torn
between rescue and nature’s
law, and the time my
daughter found them
dying like this
on the driveway,
and dug earth
from the hard ground
with her fingertips
to fill a Tupperware
bowl to save them.
Now she is
painting her nails:
each one a pink
pearl at the end
of her fingers;
singing under
headphones,
a boy band’s
song of love
for the new millennium.
___
After training as an RN and then completing a BS degree in the UK, Rita Rud emigrated to the United States to marry her husband and completed her MFA at Purdue University. After grad school, she taught writing at her alma mater until she moved to Washington State, where she is now a professor for the Honors College and founder of its literary and arts journal which will be open to students in Honors programs in the Pacific Northwest.
Before attending grad school, she was the coordinating editor for Bookbird: World of Children’s Books. The recipient of multiple teaching and writing awards, she had the opportunity to study with Patricia Henley and Marianne Boruch, among others. She had several articles published in a local newspaper when she lived in North Carolina and won the Highlights for Children Annual Story Competition in 1994. Her readership now knows her as R.M. Rud.
Sunday, September 30th, 2012 9:47 pm
Categories: Issue 6.2, Poetry
