Japanese Ladies Poem by Sally Evans

Two ladies are carrying bales of cloth
across the portrait shape of the woodblock print.
Their colorus are limited to or ange and blue,
and their faces and hairstyles are conventional,
but the life in the liens of their flowing robes
and flowing bldies and the connection between them,
two ladies crossing a landing with kimono lengths
bea down on us from a different culturem a different place
with an immediacy beyond language, a punch that art has
and peotry does not have, a dimen sion from flatness,
a comment from silence, and movement from strong lines
se down as stillness. Perhaps that is poetry after all.


2007 from The Great North Road