But when she quotes Stafford,
Around our group I could hear
the wilderness listen,
and then brings you in
Everyone needs beauty
as well as bread, their eyes
roll back in their heads.
Not the sacred moment
you would hope for.
And the attorneys
for the mining company
haven’t looked up
for ten minutes.

I too know words
with music
in their shoes.
But old father, last leaf,
it’s time to forget all that,
time to stoke
sediment and erosion,
target species and wellsprings,
water tables and extinction.
Time for facts waist-deep
as your June flowers.
But still language
that can break your heart.
(Copyright 2002, C. Germain)

The Sisters
We know they renounce us,
choose to live with women only,
the convent a small compound
across the street from the school.
Renounce children, that is, miraculous gifts
from God, and therefore houses full
of us, and everything that goes with us.

What do nuns know,
gold bands on their marriage fingers,
brides of Christ--

What we know: our parents take naps
on Sunday afternoons, bedroom doors locked,
Patsy Cline or Johnny Cash on the radio.

This collection is full of keen imagery, compact and evocative of motion and emotion. (Bill Wesse, Main Street Rag, Winter 2003)

I sense the breath, the drawing in, then expelling outward of this poet, as she silently observes, and carefully notes, life currents flowing, ebbing around her form. There is energy and pulsations, anguish and hope, strength and weakness, bruises and catharsis. Carmen Germain is tuned to life as if she had a direct line to the prevailing, primary earth-goddess-mother. Carmen is on very close terms with her own inner poetic core-voice. (Joyce Metzger, January 2003)