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92

92…

To be understood words are objective

yet we understand them subjectively.

When Willa Cather writes, “The long main street

began at the church, the town seemed to flow

from it like a stream from a spring,” the prose

forms naturally from the simile.

Do you feel it as I do when I read

that words not only are but also live

from church to street to town to spring as if

the stream itself were writing the sentence?

Cather is here with me in the present

bringing from the past continuous gifts

words that are as real as the broken fence

we built with Dad to keep the horses in.

Drawing by Akram

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