A UMD employee recently found these poems by recently retired professor of poetry Kate Basham in Port Cities magazine. We hope you enjoy this work.
SHOUTS OF MORE! MORE!
Now we are flying at eye level with cows on bluffs. Like no storms at all, these cows' eyes are calms used to intrusions. Their tails slap off afflictions. Ground fog burns off around them like St. Elmo's Fire. That they are scattered about beyond the trees is painterly necessity. With the moo and low we have known all along, the fog, which as lifted them up short, gently lays them down. "Bravo," someone is shouting, "More! More!"
THE WARTCHARMERS
When things quit making sense doubts rise up out of the body. Suddenly, we believe them. To believe something compensates for change in the body. Where pain is granted as kindness, in kindness we seem to be no one we know. We ask nothing for what we do. We hum strange and improvident songs.
FOR A CHILD
Series is a brown color, very tall.
It listens like a tree to what the hand holds like the roots the clods each thing is taken up and let go is a season sun and storm and bright skywind and silence.
Serious is a brownlaugh bird flight full of gray.
Wings wear it out when there is somewhere else to go in steady weather.
A MOTH LANDS ON A PHOTO OF SNOWY WOODS
Where the nightfarmer's lights threw wings and the fields were fingerprints like Munch's "the Cry" and I who was I that was gone wearing grief and longing away? At work like an argument left in the weather of laughter and anger greater than objects to which they belong. It does not beat against it.