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. . . Sufficient light . . . she turned the manuscript’s pages. The colors were subdued, naturally, and they had a transparency they had not possessed in daylight, the transparency of a rainbow.

They manifested that clear, shining quality, and it was as if she were seeing them through a medium that, like space, had its own transparency. And dimension. Why had this three-dimensional feature not caught her attention earlier? Each illumination seemed to stand out rainbowlike from the parchment, and she could not gauge its distance from either the page or herself. Within each illumination, too, three dimensions danced. Yes, she could almost see movement in the illumination of the tree in the garden, as though a wind had stirred the leaves and grass. And hadn’t that bird, the one near the top of the tree, been more deeply hidden? . . .

. . . She felt on the back of her neck the shivery, mothlike brush that told her she was uneasy. It was as if the whole time she had been examining the book, someone had stood not five feet away reading her.

For both Hannah Wentworth, a bookshop owner in a small New England town, and her daughter Julia, a student eagerly undertaking an environmental internship in Hawaii, the guardianship of an unusual Ethiopian illuminated manuscript brings about an awakening, a questioning of everyday choices; the manuscript becomes the start of a journey that leads them into dangerous territory extending beyond physical boundaries. Daughters in the Field is a novel exploring the light and the dark forces contending for its characters' hearts and lives.

Daughters in the Field

Carved Cherubim and Palm Trees : Poems

Something Rare

While other trees are motionless

coconut palms still sway

as if they were underwater.

Surely no element as thin as air,

as common as simple welfare

supports them—

it must be something rare.

When a trade wind blows

we almost see what it is

but the coconut palms are

so many whirling things,

like quick-change artists

yet all at once

they are marine-green waterspouts,

tall-stemmed tornados,

open orbits of long leaves

and suns revolving two-edged swords,

flashing colors impossible to catch—

quicksilver? depthless gold?

They are keener, brighter gifts

than we expect

from day’s rays

and who can tell,

they may reflect

the colors that light held

when it was first

called into life.

The wind is stronger now,

blows the coconut palms so low

toward ground, we fear the worst,

but they do not depend

like other trees on solid trunks

and deep taproots, they send

their roots out sideways

searching far and wide

for watershine, they tend

to bend in heavy wind.

They look like perfect question marks

against a flying page of sky, they pose,

one after another taking

a momentary place, composed

for something more

by someone else

and we follow

line by clear line,

keeping them in sight, wind-blown

by words not our own.