POETRY MONTH FEATURED POET: MINNIE BRUCE PRATT

Minnie Bruce Pratt has published six books of highly-acclaimed poetry, was for five years a member of the editorial collective of Feminary: A Feminist Journal for the South, Emphasizing Lesbian Visions, and has written a great deal of important work contradicting multiple oppressions (racism, anti-Semitism, classism, woman-hating) on a solid front. I prize my signed copy of The Sound Of One Fork where she encouraged my own writing during the 1980s. Below is the title poem from that volume:

THE SOUND OF ONE FORK

Through the window screen I can see an angle of grey roof
and the silence that spreads in the branches of the pecan tree
as the sun goes down. I am waiting for a lover. I am alone
in a solitude that vibrates like the cicada in hot midmorning,
that waits like the lobed sassafras leaf just before
Its dark green turns into red, that waits
like the honey bee in the mouth of the purple lobelia.

While I wait, I can hear the random clink of one fork
against a plate. The woman next door is eating supper
alone. She is sixty, perhaps, and for many years
she has eaten by herself the tomatoes, the corn
and okra that she grows in her backyard garden.
Her small metallic sound persists, as quiet almost
as the windless silence, persists like the steady
random click of a redbird cracking a few
more seeds before the sun gets too low.
She does not hurry, she does not linger.

Her younger neighbors think that she is lonely,
that only death keeps her company at meals.
But I know what sufficiency she may possess.
I know what can be gathered from year to year,
gathered from what is near to hand, as I do
elderberries that bend in damp thickets by the road,
gathered and preserved, jars and jars shining
in rows of claret red, made at times with help,a
a friend or a lover, but consumed long after,
long after they are gone and I sit
alone at the kitchen table.

And when I sit in the last heat of Sunday
afternoons on the porch steps in the acid breath of the boxwoods,
I also know desolation and consider death as an end.
The week is over, the night that comes will not lift.
I am exhausted from making each day.
My family and children are in other states,
the women I love in other towns. I would rather be here
than with them in the old ways, but when all that’s left
of the sunset is the red reflection underneath the clouds,
when I get up and come in to fix supper
in the darkened kitchen I am often lonely for them.

In the morning and the evening we are by ourselves,
the woman next door and I. Sometimes we are afraid
of the death in solitude and want someone
else to live our lives. Still we persist.
I open the drawer to get out the silverware.
She goes to her garden to pull weeds and pick
the crookneck squash that turns yellow with late summer.
I walk down to the pond in the morning to watch
and wait for the blue heron who comes at first light
to feed on minnows that swim through her shadow in the water.
She stays until the day grows so bright
that she cannot endure it and leaves with her hunger unsatisfied.
She bows her wings and slowly lifts into flight,
grey and slate blue against a paler sky.
I know she will come back. I see the light create
a russet curve of land on the farther bank
where the wild rice bends heavy and ripe
under the first blackbirds. I know
that she will come back. I see the light curve
in the fall and rise of her wing.


Minnie Bruce Pratt, from The Sound of One Fork by Night Heron Press, 1981