HUNTING
IN MEMORY OF THE PHOTOGRAPHER DIANE ARBUS

She stalked them through the corridors
Of a sterile New Jersey clinic
Where keepers polished
Stainless steel locks
Massaged the bars
On rain streaked windows

Freaks and circus clowns
Transvestites wearing
Harlequin patches on their heart
Down syndrome souls with broad faced genes
Eyes alive with love
Naked windows in the attic of our house

She¹d seen enough of finely carved mannequins
Battling anorexia and crow¹s feet
Eyes suffocating in layers
Of shadow and mascara
To know the camera can abet the lie
Or lay bare the wound of truth.

ANCESTRAL CHORALE FROM WALES

The echo is seasoned with choir boys
Whose wide-eyed notes were the wick
That lit a thousand faces in the mines
Of a land where the day star was subterranean

Where men whose eyes creased
In their dawn
Whose shoulders buckled early
In the battle
Burnt incense before their sons
Before the diamond C dissolved
In a spongy lung dusted
With bitumen flakes
My heart scales the mountain of their song
So rarely each fresh ascent is an Austerlitz
Their fathers fertilized the soil
Where a gene to rappel
Took root.

Suzanne Richardson Harvey is retired. She lectured for 19 years in the English Department of Stanford University in California in the USA. In addition, during that time for almost a decade, she served as a resident fellow in an all-freshmen dormitory. Before that, she was an instructor at Tufts University in New England, where she received her doctorate in Elizabethan poetry, specifically that of Edmund Spenser. Recently, in her retirement she has been active in teaching at Emeritus College in the San Francisco Bay Area for about six years. She is the author of over 30 published poems and some 30 awards from contests and competitions.

Email: Suzanne Richardson Harvey

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