Miriam Sagan
Battle of Punished Woman’s Fork, Kansas, 1878
I ask the lady at the desk
at the state park
what the name means
she says—in eleven years here
no one has asked that question—
but she doesn’t offer any answer
the land
is covered in marks
so too the map
although the soil itself
might just crumble
through our fingers
nothing to tell me
who is Punished Woman
and what was her fate
but is there any
portion of earth
that might not
bear
her name?
Miriam Sagan is the author of 30 books, including the novel Black Rainbow (Sherman Asher, 2015) and Geographic: A Memoir of Time and Space (Casa de Snapdragon). Winner of the 2016 Arizona/New Mexico Book Award in Poetry. She founded and headed the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College until her retirement in 2017. Her blog, Miriam’s Well, has a thousand daily readers. She has been a writer in residence in two national parks, at Yaddo, MacDowell, Colorado Art Ranch, Andrew’s Experimental Forest, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Iceland’s Gullkistan Residency for creative people, and another dozen or so remote and unique places. Her awards include the Santa Fe Mayor’s award for Excellence in the Arts, the Poetry Gratitude Award from New Mexico Literary Arts, and A Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa.
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