Sighting — Blackbird Archive

← v8n2, Fall 2009

I did not see a god,

and the god I did not see was not

the god I was told

to see or call, alternately,

in the trade and settle of God’s country

where the farmer’s root crops

were gone, almost—

Shoot me, said the earth,

like a woman who would not

do it to herself. The ones who heard

convinced her why they could not, why not,

even as they took their sticks

to her in the street.

Shoot me, said the earth. Shoot.

religion spirituality violence

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.