February:

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Auguries of the Planter

by Casey Roberts

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Show Statement:

So it was in the beginning, when our feet had tread over the unscathed whole, glistening green with newness. Came the dark and the light that passed over them in repetition. Their eyes observed clouds and clarity--they numbered the stars. We named these lights and their passage; to know them, to grasp such heights. In the daylight, the planter sows his seeds. When the sun plunges to its watery depths, the planter also waters the tilled earth. This, so the sun does not drink from the thirsting babes with its yellow heat. 

The moon, a sharpened disk, shows the dagger's shape 'til its shadow is the only light. The returns the milky silver--to brighten the season in scarlet or gold. The planter sees a red moon, its call for the reaping--and the planter obliges. Beneath a shimmering tablet does the planter heed. Soon the flaming sky will lick the earth, to warm the planter's feet, to taste the harvest. Soon bare arms will trace the smoke back to the skies, then a blossoming. All this the planter sees, even in the darkest night, for he has numbered the stars; for he knows them. 

 

Bio:

Casey Roberts is a name and a memory—longing to be remembered. Quilts are a home, both foreign and familiar. Clothes, an illusion. Dolls, a cry from the child we knew. We are the sum of time: the resilience, the degradation, the patina all testify to a present informed by the past. Textiles are not only a shield from time, but a window into its passage. Art is an ode to a life thoroughly lived. Roberts is a perennial flower, growing in the Black Belt of Alabama.