[Click] Photo Lorraine Gane is the author of a chapbook, Earth Light (Golden Bough Press, 2001) and the book Even the Slightest Touch Thunders on My Skin Black Moss Press, 2002). She is working on the next two volumes of poetry (A Winter in Egypt and Island of the Dove), to complete a trilogy on love, loss and renewal. She lives on Salt Spring Island, B.C.

Monday's Poem © Lorraine Gane, 2004 IN THE FIELDS OF IRAQ? No one notices her slip out from the darkened room where the family eats noon and night by the fire, and the girl, barefooted and wearing only a night shift walks slowly into the cool air before the light enters the yard. 'You never know,' she thinks, 'perhaps I'll find a flower by the water,' so she takes a cup hoping to bring it back full to the hut where everyone is sleeping. Nothing stirs outside, not even the dog whose head lies still on the dust. She takes the path into the grass thinking of games she'll play with her brothers when they awake, and sticks she'll collect with her mother for the first meal, yet there is something rising in the sky from the mountains in the west and now it's louder than thunder. A rain of heat flashes down just as she touches a tiny blue flower by her feet.