Maura

Speak Forest

Why so still, they ask, why so heavy on the crisp needles your crush-grass, moss-wheezy, flopsy limbs? You sad? Your roots not fingering down into the soil and playing with stones and small tunnels, voles, beetle shells? Not sifting the crumbled leaves? You clomp. We is what was planted or what sprouted, willy-nilly, in aContinue reading “Speak Forest”

North Carolina Poetry Society

The NCPS every year holds a competition for poems in a variety of categories. I was happy to learn that in 2022 I won the Mary Ruffin Poole Award for a poem on a theme of “American heritage, sibling-hood, or nature,” for my poem “Copperhead.” I also won the Alice Osborne Award, “for children 2Continue reading “North Carolina Poetry Society”

William Matthews Poetry Prize

I was delighted to learn from Keith Flynn, editor of the Asheville Poetry Review, that I was awarded first place in the 2022 William Matthews Poetry Prize competition, for my poem “Verbesina occidentalis.” The judge was Marilyn Nelson. The prize is a generous one, including not only enough money to buy a good many booksContinue reading “William Matthews Poetry Prize”

Land

It opens, and then opens again,
grows over, and changes,

lose-some, gain-some.

There were trees,
once, deer cover, and browse,

hunting grounds of hawk and owl, squirrel runs,

old stumps and bark, nothing
if not hospitable ….

Ancestors

All my mothers are here

in their best dresses: mother

grandmothers, great-grandmothers;

of the men only my father

posed with cigarette in hand

and my grandfather on the sofa ….

Embroidered Field

Who pulled the floss from the skein
and knotted it, choosing
among the colors of flowers the colors of these

perfect, impossible asters, flower within flower,
corymbs and umbels, stitched in a time, I will,
I will not, I will, I will not. Knot ….

Field as Auditorium

You say my messages did not get through

What sound do messages make as they
lose themselves in the ether

glissando diminuendo

What is the sound of my lost language ….

The Puddle

In a rut in the dirt road:
a vernal pool. A few small,
almost transparent water striders
twitch the surface, and below them,
tadpoles wriggle and float
in the limpid water,
hundreds of them—all
straining cell by cell to be
among the living,
the fat, full-throated racket
and splurge of spring
up and down the creek.

Excerpts from MILLSTONES

The millstone set in a front yard
at the intersection of two roads
in Carrboro, North Carolina,

knows what we lost ….

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