I have a sequel to it that I wrote about eight years later
it's in-- that was in my first book
On The Edge, which is out of print
and from which I rarely read because it's out of print.
This is in Not This Pig, published
by Wesleyan Publishing Company, I no longer like.
I discovered that they were Methodists.
They discovered I was a communist--
[LAUGHTER]
So it's mutual parting of the ways.
I'm now published by a International Bible Society,
and the books get around, they really get around.
My hope is eventually to be a comic book.
I wrote this about eight years seven or eight years later,
things are much worse--
[LAUGHTER]
Because, not because we're older,
and not because we love each other less,
but because it's a harder time to live.
Our children are getting older and there's a war going on,
and the sons are summoned by the war.
It's the last section of a long poem called
the "Morning After the Storm."
And we've awakened after a violent physical storm
and my wife is trying to put the yard together and I survey her.
I call her Indian, and she's part Indian
and I call her Indian in the end of the poem.
The winds and the dogs brought down the garbage.
Ostrich-like my wife picks at the tidbits on the lawn.
The wet winds gust and her night clothes flap around her.
In her 40th year she stoops, and pecks,
and clears our little yard.
She turns away from nothing: grounds, bottles, bones,
egg shells, animal fat, the splintered plastic guns,
the burned out bulbs, and swollen batteries,
all the refuse of this house.
The sky clenches again.
Our three sons grow toward war.
Child of the land, Indian, you cannot live here anymore.
Which is a paraphrase of something she said to me.
Want to leave the country, we did leave the country,
we lived two years in Spain.
You might wonder why Spain, well, it's
hard to leave California saying go to a free country.
You wouldn't know how to behave.
I feel perfectly at home in Arizona, for example.
And Spain was like the mother country,
I felt much freer there actually.