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The Legal Studies Forum
Volume 30, Number 1/2 (2006) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum Lawyers & Poets Journeys Close to Home JOSEPH CALDWELL _____________________________ Otterbien Cemetery, Jackson County "Tell Me Your Maiden Name" Some reverently placed roses in vases. One woman worked alone, trimming peony With a delicate touch Which seemed to be a form of prayer. As I approached she turned With a look of quiet desperation, Something more than grief. After pausing, she finally spoke "All the markers look the same, I can't remember who I came to see." Crowded clouds merged into green hills. [251]
Joseph Caldwell, a native of West Virginia, is an attorney in Charleston. He received his B.A. degree from West Virginia University in 1969, his law degree from the University of Florida in 1974, and was admitted to the West Virginia bar in 1974. He was born in 1947 at Charleston, West Virginia. Caldwell's chapbook, Sabbatical on Winifrede Hollow, was published in 1993 by Trillium Press (a second edition was published in 1998). In 1992 he won a writer's fellowship from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts. Caldwell's poems also appear in Wild Sweet Notes: Fifty Years of West Virginia Poetry 1950-1999 (Publishers Place, 2000)(Barbara Smith & Kirk Judd eds.) |
