Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume Seven
November- December 2025
Three Poems from the Field, poems by Laura Johanna Braverman.
On Looking at Haystacks
Harvest, Afternoon
In the field near the yellow school
where I first used fountain-ink for numbers
a man sits atop a tractor –
cutting pathways in the green
while a girl in purple shorts
rakes the foliage into rows.
Everywhere the scent of cut grass
drying in the copper light.
Bales, Morning
Today the field is a dance
of round-wrapped bundles –
a geometric cryptograph
seen from space –
the old story of bodies bending
over the tall crop
blade thrash –
the shoring-up of grace.
Gathering, Dusk
Come evening the bales are marshaled
into ranks, shoulder to shoulder
against the slate alps.
Light collapses
over the shorn ground. Only stubble
remains for the deer –
their quicksilver bodies flash.
In Extremis
Busy with a blue bellflower
in a rock-face crack, I don’t see
the nestling at first –
still breathing on the path.
I look for something we could safely
rest it on until trail’s end,
until we reach the house.
My husband tells me: It won’t work –
my son, Mom, don’t interfere –
We’ve tried this once before
I know – in the days
of revolution and suicides,
fed our garden fledgling
through a syringe,
made a makeshift nest in a box.
It chirped a day or two, then stopped.
The alternatives to giving up.
When Gales Arrive
to Break the Canicule
Laura Johanna Braverman is a writer and artist. She is the author of Salt Water. (Cosmographia Books, 2019). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Plume, Levure Litteraire, MER, Tupelo Quarterly, The Fourth River, Reliquiae, and California Quarterly, among other journals, as well as the collections Awake in the World, vol. II and the Russell Streur Nature Anthology. She is currently a doctoral candidate in poetry at Lancaster University. A graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, her painting works were more recently exhibited in 2023 at the Mina Image Centre (An Ever-Changing Stream), and in 2024 at Saleh Barakat Gallery (Faith in the Forming). Austrian/American by birth and upbringing, she lives in Lebanon with her family.