Thursday, March 27, 2025: Jennifer M Phillips's "Kasha Katuwe"

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A much-published bi-national immigrant, gardener, Bonsai-grower, painter, Jennifer M Phillips has lived in five states, two countries, and now, with gratitude, in Wampanoag ancestral land on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Phillips' chapbooks are: Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (iblurb.com, 2020), A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022), and Sailing To the Edges (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming 2025). Phillips had two poems nominated for this year's Pushcart Prize. and is a 2024 finalist in the  Eyelands Book Competition, and Cutthroat's Joy Harjo Poetry contest. Her collection is Wrestling With the Angel (Wipf & Stock, 2024).


Kasha Katuwe (Tent Rocks, ABQ, New Mexico)


High country constant wind, soil long ago lifted and gone

   and now even the red dust in migration.

Hoodoos, the idols wind chisels for our admonishment

   hat-stoned, a looming eerie supervision

threatening to petrify us into virtue or at least

   a measure of caution and self-examination

when, really, they are dissolving and departing in rock-time,

   like the rest of us gristle-skinned overnight lodgers on this ground.

Whenever the world smashes like a dinner plate sliding

   through all our soapy, inept fingers,

when spite slips its thorns in, and malice hacks the community bank

   to loot  its last trace of comfort and confidence,

a drive up to this mesa is soul-steadying. The wind-council is always

   unpitying and incisive among these monumental mudstones, 

resharpening its blade in the place it has come crouching for centuries

   whittling away, testing the edges. Endurance. Passage.

Wind says: no cause for despair here.  None of this is here for you.

   And it says, all of this is for you.


© 2025 Jennifer M Phillips

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