The Amish man barefoot,
Barren country road,
In dark clothes.
Sun's rays wither from
Autumn sky.
His horses feed in the barn.
Wood for the bitter winter
Cut by hand with axe and wedge.
The Amish work through pouring rain
And bitter cold.
On the Sabbath, fields remain empty,
Their children carry hay
Spread corn for the chickens
Among the English
The owner’s manual is three inches thick.
We worry about the war
Whose end seems far away,
Young die every day.
We listen to the campaign battles
Discuss war records, social security,
Wonder who we should vote for
Or if we should bother.
The news:
Shortage of flu vaccines,
Policy on cloning,
Rapes, murders.
What has happened
To the world we once knew
Without fear, without locks,
With guns but without crime,
The world without computers,
Calculators, contingency tables and actuaries
Lived by the sun, not the clock.
The Amish man
Whistles a soft tune,
Smokes his hand-hewn pipe
Consulting the sky
For signs of tomorrow's weather.
ISBN 1-59661-037-9
29 pages/$9
“Like the other indistinguishables / I want to stand out” is Kimberley Bertrand’s deceivingly simple and utterly spiritual cry. Existing wholly in air and what elements suffuse it, Give Me Gray is the continuous testimony of our amorphous existences. In Bertrand's hands, the body is the voice, and the voice a vibration of that same air we ask God to fashion for us into only necessary things: “give me gray sky and gray clouds.”
—Robert Strong, author of Puritan Spectacle and editor of The Autumn House Anthology of American Spiritual Poetry
Kimberley Bertrand’s score of poems are meditations and introspections that illuminate and reveal. Like the gray days of her title poem, they provide the occasion to take the time to be still. All the poems collected here do what the sailor in “Red Sky of Hope” does: they throw a lifeline.
—Stephanie Coyne DeGhett, poetry editor of Blueline; her work has appeared in Wordsmith and the New England Review.
Kimberley Bertrand lives in a small town in northern New York with her partner of five years. She currently teaches as an adjunct writing instructor at SUNY Canton College, Canton, New York. She enjoys writing, reading, crocheting, and remodeling. This is her first chapbook of poems.