Little Goat — Blackbird Archive

← v8n2, Fall 2009

God is not light upon light, no more

than goat is need upon need although there, where it grazes, it is

sun upon coat within which ticks and stray-blown feed

burrow into the pocked skin of such foul scent

covering the underflesh heart that could

eat this farmer’s grain or the barren mountain’s bark

high in the solitude of sheer animal

peace laid over sheer animal terror.

We ask the animal afflicted by its time,

its impoverished American meadow

that drove it to find birch from which to strip its easy feed

to abide with us. It does not need us.

We think it needs us.

We must forgive God God’s story.

religion animals nature

Katie Ford

Katie Ford is the author of the poetry collection Colosseum (Graywolf Press, 2008), which won the 2009 Levis Reading Prize; the chapbook Storm (Marick Press, 2007); and the poetry collection Deposition (Graywolf, 2002). Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review , The Paris Review , Ploughshares , Partisan Review , Seneca Review , Poets & Writers , and Pleiades . Her work is forthcoming in The New Yorker , Smartish Pace , and Bayou Magazine . She was poetry editor of the New Orleans Review from 2005–2009, and she has taught at Loyola University and Reed College. Ford is currently a professor at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.