A QuakerBridge Media Publication
Collected together for the first time are the selected poems of Janeal Turnbull Ravndal, who "is solidly Quaker: she sees the beauty and the power of the worship and the work. She also sees the warts. In felicitous words, rhymed or not, she tells us truth, sometimes using the sharpest of scalpels, sometimes merely gentle irony. She sees us clear."
“Janeal Ravndal’s poems reveal the link between two worlds, the world of beauty in nature and the world of human suffering. She recognizes herself in the first world by being all the more present in the second.”
- Allen Brick, memoirist, poet, anti-war activist
Before Fig Leaf and Winesap
The fabled first fall
was that one for which
Eve and her younger sisters
take the rap. I doubt Eve even
plucked it - apple if it was, or apricot
or fig - from some well-weighted branch.
More likely, in that early autumn, found it
fallen at her feet and, wanting to avoid all
waste, lifted and whiffed and, starting us
toward science, tasted it. Ah, tongue!
Ah, taste! Ah, no accounting for,
the textured, saucy sweetness
of first falls.
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