July 2018
The Keepers
by Kirk Westphal
Reverent hands select boards
that will hold the books,
Poplar, neither hard nor soft –
the durability of words
and malleability of intentions
embossed with clear grain of a Vermont river,
shadowed with alluring verdant hues
exposed to light
after years of quiet preparation
in the lexicology of trees.
These boards might have become paper
but do not choose their resurrection
nor measure one against another.
Ink on paper smells as new and old
as a fresh saw cut –
no knots in finely crafted lines.
Kirk Westphal is a water resource consultant, amateur carpenter, coach, author, and songwriter. The poem, "The Keepers," is excerpted from his first published collection of poetry, Bodies of Wood and Water (Kelsay Books/Aldrich Press, 2018). He is also the author of No Ordinary Game (DownEast Books, 2015), a collection of stories about great moments in sports that happen to everyday people. He lives in Stow, MA and is currently putting the finishing touches on a timber frame cabin in the Berkshire foothills, which is sure to become his favorite place to write in the years ahead.
Kirk will be reading from Bodies of Wood and Water at the Silver Unicorn Bookstore’s first poetry night on Wednesday, July 18 at 6 p.m., 12 Spruce Street, Acton, MA. Joining Kirk will be Helen Marie Casey, Christopher Clark, and Susan Edwards Richmond. Please come, hear some great poetry, and check out this beautiful new bookstore in West Acton.
June 2018
Earthdaughters
by Jeanne LeBaron Sawyer
‟marsh marigolds”
she notes
as we round the corner by the brook
and in my head I hear a timeless chorus
my mother’s voice and mine joining hers
‟skunk cabbage!”
as we compile
the catalog of spring
Jeanne LeBaron Sawyer, librarian and dedicated amateur naturalist, wrote this poem in about 1985. Like almost all her poems it had never been published until the past decade, when Jeanne worked with her daughter, poet and editor Polly Brown, and with book designer Sarah Bennett, to produce a first book. Evolution: Poems Across Seven Decades was released by Heron Pond Press in 2017. Jeanne died in May 2018, at 90, leaving many memories of shared ‟bog joy,” as her grandchildren referred to it, and these poems.
May 2018
This month’s poem was selected by Polly Brown.
Beltane—May 1
by Deborah Melone
Today is Beltane
Wear yellow flowers
Walk your cows between
The two bonfires
Leap over the flame
Garland the cattle
Leave the spirits oatcake
Drink the winy caudle
Dance round the maypole
Decked with shells today
Honor the union
Of Lord and Lady May
Strew primrose and hawthorn
At windows and doors
From the Beltane fires
Rekindle yours
Deborah Melone lives in Watertown, Massachusetts. For many years a writer and editor at a scientific consulting company, she now teaches English as a Second Language to adult students at the Watertown Public Library. She has been a member of the poetry collective Every Other Thursday since 1983, and has published in a number of magazines and journals. She has published the poetry collection Farmers’ Market and two chapbooks, Walking the Air and The Wheel of the Year.
April 2018
Near the Connecticut
by Polly Brown
Four of us travelling in one canoe—
two small enough to fit between
the paddlers—down the Connecticut,
New England’s watery spine.
We sat on a ledge in sunshine;
then, needing to pee, I climbed
to a small wood. Sun-dappled shade,
blue chinks of sky, nameless
sparrows dipping in, weaving through:
no remembered detail explains
why in that moment I woke
to our life in paradise. Which means
it could happen
almost anywhere again.
Polly Brown has organized outdoor poetry events on her hillside in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, has written about war and peace at the Joiner Institute at UMass Boston, and will lead a workshop focused on two poems by Stanley Kunitz at the 2018 Massachusetts Poetry Festival. Pebble Leaf Feather Knife, her new book of poems, will be released by Cherry Grove in 2019. The two children in this poem are now busy rearing another generation of canoeists and kayakers.
March 2018
This month’s offering is selected by Terry House, President of the Robert Creeley Foundation. Join us for Mark Doty's reading at the 2018 Creeley Foundation's annual event. Details below.
Heaven for Stanley
by Mark Doty
For his birthday, I gave Stanley a hyacinth bean,
an annual, so he wouldn’t have to wait for the flowers.
He said, Mark, I have just the place for it!
as if he’d spent ninety-eight years
anticipating the arrival of this particular vine.
I thought poetry a brace against time,
the hours held up for study in a voice’s cool saline,
but his allegiance is not to permanent forms.
His garden’s all furious change,
budding and rot and then the coming up again;
why prefer any single part of the round?
I don’t know that he’d change a word of it;
I think he could be forever pleased
to participate in motion. Something opens.
He writes it down. Heaven steadies
and concentrates near the lavender. He’s already there.
—Copyright 2005 by Mark Doty
Mark Doty is the Winner of the Eighteenth Annual Robert Creeley Award. He will be presented with the award and give a free public reading on Tuesday, March 20, 2018, at 7:30 in the Acton-Boxborough Regional High School auditorium. Hope to see you there!
Mark Doty is the author of nine books of poetry, including Deep Lane (April 2015), Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, which won the 2008 National Book Award, and My Alexandria, for which he was the first American to receive Great Britain's T.S. Eliot Prize. He is also the author of three memoirs: the New York Times-bestselling Dog Years, Firebird, and Heaven's Coast, as well as a book about craft and criticism, The Art of Description: World Into Word. Doty has received two NEA fellowships, Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, a Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Award, and the Witter Byner Prize.
February 2018
Poem of the Month selections can now also be accessed through my website at www.susanedwardsrichmond.com.
The Orchard in Winter
by Terry House
Storm's end quickens;
Still, wizened apples cling;
Barred owl glides
Silent as the last, slow flakes -
In their kitchen
The farmers scan
Nursery lists,
Plotting spring.
Terry House is a poet and educator living in Acton. She currently serves as President of the Robert Creeley Foundation.
January 2018
Happy New Year! Wishing our Old Frog Pond Farm community near and far a new year filled with joy and discovery. January’s poem was selected by Moira Linehan.
Reading
by Betsy Sholl
Because the titmice at the feeder are
all silk and tufted gray, and the cardinals
beautifully paired in their marriage
of subtle and brash, I have to read
the same sentence seven times,
then finally give up and study instead
the suggestions of bright red flashing
as house finches occupy the feeder.
On my lap an essay explaining
Dickinson's deft ironies, elusive
dashes and slants, so dense I have to stop
wanting to get to the end, the bottom
of anything, and just live in the drift
of phrase and clause, until once again
a feathered thing—a nuthatch heading down
a rutted trunk—catches my eye, and I
am torn like an old uneasy treaty,
within a single mind two tribes dwelling,
people of the book, yes, but also others
literate in seed husk, rain slant, cloud,
a thousand twittering tongues.
—from Late Psalm, Univ. Wisconsin Press
Betsy Sholl served as Poet Laureate of Maine from 2006 to 2011. Her eighth collection of poetry, Otherwise Unseeable (University of Wisconsin), won the 2015 Maine Literary Award for poetry. She currently teaches in the MFA Program of Vermont College of Fine Arts, and lives in Portland.
December 2017
The Shortest Day of the Year
by Wendy Mnookin
Our doors blocked by a blizzard
the two of us climbed from a window
into a world made new—
mailboxes buried, signs disappeared.
We walked on the tops of bushes,
dug until we found our car.
And dug some more.
We cleared the hood,
unburdened the windshield,
tunneled all the way to the tires.
Then what?
The roads were closed,
there was nowhere to go.
Sweating inside our layers,
we let ourselves fall
back into drift.
We had no ambition.
For minutes, or a year,
it was enough to lie there,
stunned with sun, with implacable white.
Our eyes glazed.
The frost of our breath happened.
And then we stood, clapping
our jackets free of snow,
suddenly shy
to see the imprint of wings,
so slight, it’s a wonder
we trusted ourselves at all.
From The Moon Makes Its Own Plea, BOA Editions, 2008
Wendy Mnookin’s most recent book is Dinner with Emerson (Tiger Bark Press, 2016.) The recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Writing, Wendy has taught poetry at Emerson College and Boston College. You can find out more about her writing at wendymnookin.com.
November 2017
NOT AS ONE who knows the ground
by Joan Houlihan
NOT AS ONE who knows the ground
but woken to a standing,
Ay rose and held as bird would hold
for want of weather, flight.
Far, the hard light grew.
The us were down in sleep.
Fire blacked away.
None would know me
colding there. Ay stood and stept
as calf that has no mother-side,
as a weak thing made, then fell
and lay in a smaller place to wait.
Where a noise had been
Ay let a quiet in.
From Ay, Tupelo Press, 2014
Joan Houlihan is the author of five books of poetry including Shadow-feast, forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2018. Her other books are: Ay (2014), The Us (2009), The Mending Worm, winner of the 2005 Green Rose Award from New Issues Press and Hand-Held Executions: Poems & Essays (2003). She has taught at Columbia University, Emerson College and Smith College and serves on the faculty of Lesley University’s Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is also Professor of Practice in Poetry at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Houlihan founded and directs the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference.
October 2017
Harvest
by Charles Pratt
The trees, I’m told, have stood here fifty years—
Bearers still. The motherly Cortlands, fat
As their dusky apples, cookers, firm in pies.
The Macs more upright, sparer, the apples—
This year, at least—scarcer, smaller, brighter,
Flecked with little lights. And the Wageners,
Bristling with apples from a thousand spurs,
The fruit a modest russet, turning as it ripens
To scarlet, apples from a Book of Hours.
⁓
Sweetness seethes from the press, foams
In the bucket; I turn with the handle
Under the mild October sun
That brings back summer, softened. Sun-yellow
Hornets, now, mellowed from when,
In August, the mower brought their stinging
Hubbub up from underground,
Nuzzle my sticky fingers, gentle as cows,
Swoon to that foaming sweetness where they drown.
⁓
Midnight, midwinter. Under the full moon
The trees, like twisting smoke, like rocks
Whorled by tides of air,
Stand stock-still in their shadows
On the new snow, precise and mysterious
As spiders on a linen tablecloth.
Arrested, I look out, investing
Them with the patient merit
And deliberate innocence I would learn of them.
From From the Box Marked Some Are Missing by Charles Pratt, Volume I of the Hobblebush Granite State Poetry Series, Hobblebush Books. Book available at http://www.hobblebush.com/product-page/from-the-box-marked-some-are-missing
Charles W. Pratt taught English for more than 25 years, mostly at Phillips Exeter Academy, before he and his wife, Joan, bought a small apple orchard in Brentwood, New Hampshire, and became apple-growers. In addition to From the Box Marked Some Are Missing, he has two previous collections, In the Orchard and Still Here.
September 2017
A Cricket Has Been Calling
by Wendy Drexler
As I wash my cereal bowl,
my blue coffee cup,
as I fill the feeder, a cricket
has been calling. I listen
for some inflection, an iamb,
I am, I am, any pattern or meaning,
but there is none, or nearly none—
just the scrape of wings, emphatic,
vaguely duple-time, insistent, tireless.
Or else a pause, and I think, ah then,
something is settled, for once.
But the cricket resumes,
an engine unrequited, an equation
to be solved, growing large
as a sound can grow—and I think
of the woman crying at the bus stop
this morning, and her children,
grieving for their father,
who is never coming back,
and I wish I could find a place
for that cricket to rest,
a place to rest
for everyone who calls and shakes
and has not been consoled.
“A Cricket Has Been Calling” is from Before There Was Before, Wendy Drexler’s new collection of poetry published in March 2017 by Iris Press, www.irisbooks.com. The poem first appeared in the journal, Common Ground.
Wendy Drexler is also the author of Western Motel (Turning Point, 2012) and the chapbook Drive-Ins, Gas Stations, the Bright Motels (Pudding House, 2007). Her first children’s book, Buzz, Ruby, and Their City Chicks, coauthored with Joan Fleiss Kaplan, was published by Ziggy Owl Press in 2016. Her poems have appeared widely in such journals as Barrow Street, Ibbetson Street, Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, The Mid-American Review, The Hudson Review, The Worcester Review, and the Valparaiso Poetry Review; featured on Verse Daily and WBUR’s Cognoscenti; and in the anthologies Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust and Burning Bright: Passager Celebrates 21 Years.
Wendy Drexler will be reading with Susan Donnelly on Thursday, September 28, 2017, at the Cervena Barva Press Studio at The Arts for the Armory, Basement, Room B8, 191 Highland Avenue, Somerville, 7:30 p.m. For more information about readings and for poetry posts see Wendy’s website: wendydrexlerpoetry.com.
August 2017
Hiss, ping ping
by Lucinda Bowen
Listen.
After a month of sun,
the sky holds itself close to the meadow
this morning, whispering, “sip, sip”
as a mother might minister to a child
whose face is flushed with fever.
The way the raindrops
line the spine
of each stalk and stem
makes me want to consider
the smallest small things.
I listen to the slip and drip,
watch the flower’s pink petals
fill like pitchers,
each no bigger than the pinkyslip
of a newborn’s fingernail.
This weather is but a gesture
to a field that has blossomed
despite seasons of thirst.
The morning’s mist
will only moisten, not quench.
Soon the cloudwisps will flounce off, distracted,
the sky behind them winking blue.
Even so, the stems shine green and golden
under the weight of this water
they have waited for.
I have skirted scarcity all my life
and yet I have never bloomed
as pink and pretty
as this thirsty flower.
I have never
bent grateful
as this blade of grass,
bearing the hiss, ping ping
sound of insufficient blessing
on my naked, needy back.
I wrote this poem early on a misty, rainy summer morning as I was walking past the orchard and the wild field next to it, near the Meditation Hut. I was struck by how the raindrops magnified every single blade of grass, each plant and flower lined in silver. And I was struck by the immense need and thirst of the field, and how meager this offering of rain would be, after so much drought.
—Lucinda Bowen
Included with Lucinda Bowen’s poem (above) is the note she wrote for Old Frog Pond Farm’s 2016 Plein Air Poetry Walk and chapbook, Splash!
Please mark your calendars for this year’s event on Sunday, September 17 at 2 p.m. at the farm. Over 20 regional poets, including Lucinda and other poets who have been featured in this blog, will read new site-specific work on the theme of Memoir. The Poetry Walk is free and open to the public. Chapbooks of the poems will also be available for purchase at the event. Hope to see you there!