Journal of Writing & Environment

Eclogue on Creek

Poetry by Rachel Morgan

Poem 1 of 2

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Originally from Tennessee, Rachel Morgan now lives, teaches, and writes in Iowa. She is co-editor of Fire Under the Moon: An Anthology of Contemporary Slovene Poetry (Black Dirt Press). Her work recently appears or is forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Fence, Denver Quarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, Mid-American Review, DIAGRAM, Barrow Street, and Hunger Mountain. She’s a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Currently she teaches at the University of Northern Iowa and is the Poetry Editor for the North American Review.

An eclogue is a poem written in the pastoral or bucolic tradition, and over time was applied to a sequence or section of writing. In this poem, I use short lyrical lines juxtaposed with gossamer images to reflect the cyclical nature of the water cycle. Water is used to cleanse almost everything on the earth, so I want the poem to consider the moment before our water source/s can no longer create ablution because of contamination.

Curved like part of a woman’s body

which has no proper name.

A watershed thin as dinner

prayers, as mosquito wings.

Like the blurry edge of a newborn’s iris.

The same and the same and aforementioned.

A second wife who becomes like the first.