"I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms"
----Wallace Stevens
"Thirteen Ways of Looking at Blackbird"
August, 2007
Juleigh Howard-Hobson
Born in England, and raised in Australia and the US, Juleigh Howard-Hobson won the prestigious Australian Returned Serviceman's League's ANZAC DAY Award for poetry (1980), and also holds a gold medal for poetry from the MacArthur Arts Festival (Australia). She is the editor of the Arets Vakreste Boker 2004 award winning Norwegian-press literary collection Undertow. Her poetry has appeared in thehypertexts.com, The Old Heathen's Almanac 2006, Flipside, On The Wing, The Australian Women’s Weekly, Seven Cups of Coffee, Macquarie University Arena ( Australia ), Focus, MotherLoad, Saczine, 9 to 5, odinsgift.com, Hipmama Magazine and Idunna.
![](graphics/Spacer646x1.gif"){kind=spacer}
Juleigh Howard-Hobson
Gretal
I'm lost and hungry but there's nothing here
To eat. I don’t know the forest's hidden
Fare—which sprig to choose, which one to steer
Clear and far away from. Birds, unbidden,
Drop small morsels at my feet—each one seems
Better than the next, bright red berries, and
Mushrooms silken capped. Wandering in narrow beams
Of sunlight that wind their way down to band
This forest floor in falling shafts of gold,
The fact these woods could hold a certain thing
Like death is strangely wrong to me— the cold
Heartless actions of stepmothers could bring
Doom, but this twittering, sun brightened wood
Seems the place to nurture life, if it could.
www.lucidrhythms.com
© 2007 David Landrum