Judy Brackett Crowe’s The Watching Sky was published by Cornerstone Press earlier this year. The poems therein are those of an expert storyteller, full of details of rural America and the natural world. She tackles the perils of class and climate change with an especially good poem about a tornado. Crowe looks back on her life with awe and candor, a nostalgia rooted in a way of life that seems long gone. We are lucky to have her document it all for us! Here’s a sample poem:
Geography of a Cloud
a huge map of her world on butcher paper,
using every crayon stub in the small
cedar box that held the bright clear colors
of her life, an immense cloud-shaped world,
endless, with hills and wide rivers,
stick people, kind people like Teacher
and her aunties and her friend Jane,
houses, horses, dogs, sunflowers
and hollyhocks. The torn blue edges
were the sky and whatever lived beyond
the fall-off places and beyond the sky—
roiling deserts, flat black seas, ice-bound lands—
triangle creatures with wiry whiskers
and many legs.
Later, hundreds of thousands of miles later,
bittersweet and periwinkle and Prussian blue
and flesh and magenta later, and thistle, salmon,
gold and silver later, after decades in the fall-off
places, she found herself in that cloud-shaped
map again, the colorful world still smelling
of crayon and cedar, of onions and summer,
and of the fields she’d looked down upon
from her childhood window in that long-ago
time, surprised to find her map so small
and so red, blue, and yellow strange.
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