Emma Lou Thayne

Emma Lou Warner Thayne was a poet and novelist. She was a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and counted as one of the 75 most significant Mormon poets. Thayne graduated from the University of Utah in 1945. She would later return there to coach tennis and teach English

Articles

Kill the Poets

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Bedouin Lullaby

Here at my breast, my dark-eyed child, 
Taste of your worth and sleep a while. 
Under the tent of the black goat’s wool 
Safe from the cold and the wind, be full. 

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To the Bedouin Woman

Let me bring home your dark eyes 
and the secret of their holiness, 
your quick fingers and your fine 
pride in the black tent they weave. 

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The Dancer and I

As I watch, astonished, 

what I hunger for 
is not what I know I 
cannot do

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Old Woman Driving

She lives on a street of white haired men 
with time for hosing the cracks. 

She goes to funerals amid people 
whose names she cannot remember,

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Hold

Gray day with a brown leaf refusing 
at the end of a wind to drop, 
why is the crabbed clinging 
so intricate a part of the dance? 

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How Much for the Earth? A Suite of Poems: About Time for Considering

The peril of extinction brings us up against this reality, this simple basic fact: Before there can be good or evil, service or harm, lamenting or rejoicing, there must be life.[1] About Considering Consider is…

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Meditations on the Heavens

On the night of 16 November 1985, Halley’s Comet was said to be visible just to the right of the Seven Sisters, the Pleiades, in the eastern sky. That night, ten of us from the…

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You Heal

One morning you wake 
and everything works 
and almost nothing hurts. 
After seven months of returning 

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Things Happen

Things happen. Early in the world you travel into them. One day
You rise without prayer in a far camp and silently hurry away.
Having slept under stars and still breathing the greyed fire,
Who would take time to suppose this the middle of a lifetime?

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Secrets under the Surface: Crazy for Living: Poems by Linda Sillitoe

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The Greening

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Awake to the Ineffable: Some Would Call It Kundalini

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To Sleep with the Ineffable: Inviting My Sweet Informants

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Silver Footprints

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On the Death by Cancer of Someone Too Young

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Out of the Night: Childness

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Night Thunder at the Cabin

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Grandma Comes for Me

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Trajectory at the End of Winter

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Emma’s Anguish

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Joseph to Emma

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Plenty

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The Handing

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The Rose Jar

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Without Question

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On a Morning After New Snow and a Winter of Healing Inside

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The Woman of Christlike Love

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Aladdin’s Lamp, March 4, 2003 on the eve of first strike in Iraq

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Where Can I Turn for Peace?

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The Rose Jar

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Plenty: A Morning Poem at 75

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