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”
Author Archives: Maura
Maura High
Poems, the Earth, books, trees, and other creatures Welcome. Please come in, make yourself at home here, explore, read, look, listen.
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 grandmother 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
STONE
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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Maura High 