Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth Read online

  The Americas

  Both Mother

  & Father

  Grandmother

  & Grandfather

  Guiding Spirit

  Of this

  Place.

  1 From Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing and Hallucinogenic Powers, by Richard Evans Schultes, Albert Hofmann, and Christian Ratsch (Healing Arts Press).

  About the Author

  ALICE WALKER won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for her novel The Color Purple. Her other novels include Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, By the Light of My Father’s Smile, Possessing the Secret of Joy, and In the Temple of My Familiar. She is also the author of three collections of short stories, three collections of essays, six previous volumes of poetry, including A Poem Traveled Down My Arm, and several children’s books. Born in Eatonton, Georgia, Walker now lives in northern California.

  Also by Alice Walker

  FICTION

  Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart

  The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart

  By the Light of My Father’s Smile

  Possessing the Secret of Joy

  The Temple of My Familiar

  The Color Purple

  You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down

  Meridian

  In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women

  The Third Life of Grange Copeland

  NONFICTION

  Sent By Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit

  Anything We Love Can Be Saved

  The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult

  Warrior Marks (with Pratibha Parmar)

  Living by the Word

  In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens

  POEMS

  A Poem Traveled Down My Arm

  Her Blue Body Everything We Know

  Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful

  Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning

  Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems

  Once

  Copyright © 2003 by Alice Walker

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Walker, Alice.

  Absolute trust in the goodness of the earth: new poems /

  Alice Walker.

  p. cm.

  PS3573.A425 A64 2003

  811’.54—dc21 2002069990

  www.atrandom.com

  www.randomhouse.com

  eISBN: 978-0-307-43056-4

  v3.0