As someone who never called herself a poet, who was comfy with it being the genre she enjoyed writing but was “bad at”, I never expected to see my poems in the printed form. On real paper. Held in my hands.
Two of my poems were chosen for a Bucknell University collection. The book features student work submitted in the Ecopoetics course taught by poet G.C. Waldrep.
I was in grad school. It was my first time back in the classroom since undergrad and my first poems after living in Bulgaria. I went each week to a little corner of the hills called Shingletown Gap, a place long sacred to me.
All that to say, it’s very rewarding to have these included. And to even be the opening poem of the collection! If you have any love for poetry and/or the middle of Pennsylvania, you’ll enjoy this. Available from Bucknell University.
And to keep the poems going, I wrote the one below in my early twenties. And it seemed relevant for where we are in the world today.
Lidice
after visiting the memorial site of a Nazi “Example Town”
Cats cry in the shadows around the dumpsters at night. In their plaintive hunger I hear a baby’s cry and hear a dream I had once: I find myself carrying a lost child, my own or found, its heavy head, soft with down, lay sick or sleeping on my chest. I held it, wanting to keep it alive, to keep its perfect helplessness, the curve of its legs, the thin eyes closed. I cannot think but of my arms, empty, wanting to hold a lost baby close. I want the nerve at the edge of all my skin to live in that moment, be held, holding, to feed this child, I want to carry life.