Tree of Life Review

SEPTEMBER 2007

NEW IN THE TREE OF LIFE REVIEW

AIRMAIL: Bodhi Blues — A Year in India: Questioning The Maitreya Project by Jessica Falcone

COLUMN: Storiedmusic — The Night I Walked Out by DJ T’challah

NOVEL EXCERPT: In a State of Partition by Aneesha Capur

UP THE CREEK: Editor’s Notes — Art, Yoga, and Abu Ghraib



Ice Ages

Any moment the Antarctic Ross ice shelf
can calve an iceberg and melt:
New York gone, Florida,
the whole Atlantic coast.

There are things that take ages
of slow melting to dismantle,
each glacial drop sweats
from its rock-hard mountain of ice.

My father died when I was five
but my dammed grief burst suddenly
upon the white-shirted chest of a stranger
when I was twenty-three.

One casual word, evocative melody,
cinematic scene, enough to nudge
wide open the crack in one’s own grave weight.

How many swelling lakes, how large the quake
to wake a dormant tidal wave? How ready
the two-billion tons to burst that which stands fixed
and frozen in one’s dwindling years?


Sandra Becker

Sandra Becker


Sandra Becker’s chapbook, Foreign Bodies, was published Spring 2004 by Carolina Wren Press. Other poems have been published in the Bucks County Writer, Comstock Review, Concrete Wolf, Flesh & Bone, Freshet, Mad Poets Review, Rexdale Publishing, Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts, Out of Line. She was a runner-up in the 2004 Robert Fraser Poetry Contest and recipient of a writing award from the National League of American Pen Women/Simi Valley Branch, placing first in their 2000 Poetry Contest for her poem, “Honor the Stones.”

SANDRA BECKER IN THIS EDITION:
POETRY: Ice Ages