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Poet's Corner
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Four OLLI poets received awards for six poems at the Poetry Society of Virginia's 2012 award ceremony. Four of the winning poems may be read below. The fifth poem, Debra Adler's A Small Gesture, appeared in E-News on May 4. The sixth poem, Jan Bohall's Hidden Memory, is in the May 11 edition of E-News. |
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The Marsh Hawk and My Mother-In-Law They faced each other across the room,  neither moving, both antiques, one barely living, the other never having been at all, and both weathered in that particular way that others of their sort are inclined to do. He was already there when she was born, the Marsh Hawk was, and she knew he would survive her, hanging there mounted and framed for posterity, one eye fixed in an eternal state of daunting readiness. We never discussed him, his origins or value, brushstrokes on branches with tufts of moss, his imposing masculinity in her watercolor songbird sanctum, the future, or the stark inevitability of his disposition. She died on a Wednesday peacefully, her faithful sentry undeterred, majestic and proud the both of them, he became her final gift, unspoken, and though not antique myself, I know he will outlast me. Debra B. Adler |
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| Thomas Wolfe Revisited It is hard to go home again as Thomas Wolfe said so well, easier now since caring for parents means to clip weeds around headstones plant perennials to raise hope for renewal, past years of duty-driven visits negotiating ways to ease days met with strong resistance implied criticism, outright refusal, denial of need. Sorrowful faces, depressed airs, discouraged words. Easier now with a coverlet of guilt over missed opportunities to open fully tightly closed doors, let a fresh wind blow through. Jan Bohall |
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| Purple Finch
Improbably pink, slight, you are unmistakable, perched at the tube feeder’s edge or flipped neatly sideways to seek out kernels in the song bird blend. Or else in motion, flicking from top to twig to outer limb, keeping track of the familiar, checking on things. But once I watched while you stood still beside the feeder as though stunned, or bemused, as if the breeze had overturned a screen and you had seen the back side of the known world. It’s more likely you had flown into the window with its hard false sky, but in any case you weren’t moving, except for those continual sharp looks from side to side at what had been there before—trowel, chaise, looped garden hose--and still were. Convalescent, you skipped to a higher spot but paused again, slack-winged, and held for a long moment there, balanced between the hard facts of wood and air until the air, insistent, swirled and received you back. Caroline McNeil |
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| On the Great Egg Harbor Bay This great, grey way, this Unmarked parking lot without the cars, But naturally the seagulls: Just a few boats in the whitecaps today. This prairie with fish, a chunk of the blue Globe in the library, but bleached To hard gunmetal in the sun, Shade, and rain. This reach of water unthinkable To the folks from Utah, Nebraska, North Platte—Oh, They do have the great rivers notching down From highlands in the spring; adjacent Summer floods matched only by The twice daily high tides here, But nothing compared to the breadth and depth Of this salt arm of what must be An endless sea, there beyond the channel Between the outer islands. I’m age ten or so, the skiff’s four times that, Heavy with paint and old caulking, Scarcely eleven foot on the waterline, now In the chop of an incoming tide Countering the west wind, Trying to get her to pass Above the shallow bank that I’m sure Houses the flatfish no one’s yet found. (There’s another name for them of course, But omen-struck as all bayfolk are, I don’t call them flounder since Naming calls, and something might hear me Summoning with verb and not the noun.) I’d like to say I caught the fish that day But didn’t. What I did hook and keep, Digested as well, was The memory of that great waterway And the forever flavor of, The sense of being on the bay. Mike Mc Namara |
Copyright © 2012 Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at George Mason University. Materials in this publication subject to OLLI-Mason copyright may be reproduced for noncommercial educational purposes as long as credit is given to OLLI-Mason.
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