A Poem by L.B. Green

Antinomies

The novel's jacket-flap posits
that love and relationships are proof

of the moral complexities of life.
She continues to cull and rearrange,

dust a house of books and shelves, empty
drawers overflowing

with years of papers no longer needed,
open rooms:  to further light and possibility,

all the while reading in both days and nights,
the newspaper notices of death, when she traces

the faces of family and friends, dead
and alive, here and everywhere.  And though

the summer weeks, spent with terra-cotta pots,
their big, bossy, yellow blooms, renew,

morning skies are sinister.  They scheme
of midnight and rain.

L.B. Green is a writer, poet, painter, and photographer.  She is the author of the books Judas Trees North of the House (2003), Night Garden (2009) and THE ART OF SEEING In Sweet Silent Thought (2010), a collection of poetry and photography.  The North Carolina Arts Council, the MacDowell Colony, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts have awarded her grants and fellowships in literature for poetry.  The recipient of both the Robert Ruark Foundation Prize and the Randall Jarrell Prize for poetry, her work has been published in anthologies, journals, magazines, and newspapers, in print and online, including:  The Southern Review, RHINO, Cold Mountain Review, Rattle, the Penwood Review, and the 40th Anniversary Anthology, ENTERING THE REAL WORLD:  VCCA POETS ON MT. SAN ANGELO.