It Happened Just Walking

Holly Hunt

It Happened Just Walking

A grove of pine trees in the pasture
Grown wild uncut for fifty years.
A place the old man never steps inside
where you venture, on one certain day and time,
encompassed by a hundred rays of parallel
sunbeams perfect in a holding pattern.
Where something you cannot see
waits forever a single step ahead.
One move deeper into the pattern of light
and the world as you know it
will never be the same.
Never again will you ever stand
on completely common ground.

Days later your cousins stand close
under the stars shivering and pulsing.
Though they cannot walk into that grove
and know what found you on that day,
they say, Tell us about it again,
how the sunlight slanted down
how you fell slow through one layer
of sun and through another a bird feather
landing on the cushion of pine needles.
Tell us again there is a way
a person might take a single step
that will change everything.

_______________

Holly Hunt has published poetry in the US literary journals Ploughshares (edited by Sherman Alexie), Poetry, The Florida Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review and other good journals. My fiction has appeared in Shenandoah, and my Op-ed pieces have appeared in a few large and small newspapers. She lives in her home state of Arkansas, in the small horse-racing town of Hot Springs in the Ouachita Mountains. She took an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas, where she won an Academy of American Poets Prize for work later published by the Academy.

Author’s Comments: Form & theory: The verse libre is similar in dramatic situation to events that literally happened to me. The structure of line-breaks carries no irony or surprise. Even so, the organic rhythm helped me explain how physical dimensions can shift.

Backstory: I walked across the back hundred acres of my grandfather’s farm. It was cleared pasture except for several acres of pines that had not been cut in a hundred years. When I got inside the forest, the atmosphere changed in pressure. A peaceful and unique vibration (genus loci) different from any I had ever experienced, swallowed me up in there.

Editor’s Notes and/or Image Credit: As input to the Microsoft Designer: “A grove of pine trees, sunlight shafting through, a feather resting on pine needles; a silhouette of a young woman falling through the sunbeams,” yielded an image that hopefully captures the mood of the poem.