THREE POEMS BY SUSAN LAUGHTER MEYERS - POET OF THE MONTH OF MAY

Hello to You Lovers of Poetry. This is the fourth post in celebration of the poems of Susan Laughter Meyers who was named POET OF THE  MONTH OF MAY 2011. Here are three more of her poems.

I am certain you will enjoy these as well as her other poems reprinted on this site during May, in this her birth month.

Your encouraging words for poetry and your comments for Susan Laughter Myers about her poems are welcome. --Nancy Simpson

Susan writes: "This is a love poem for my husband Blue, who grew up on a farm and every year plants a vegetable garden big enough for the whole neighborhood."

The Wheelbarrower

He winds down the gravel drive, 

pushing a load of mulch, 

a smaller and smaller blue shirt 

threading through the pines. 

I can barely see him, yet my eye

tends toward him like a stem to sun— 

a study of straw hat and suspenders,

his spotted dog nosing behind. Now

he’s a tiny figure in his garden. 

Beyond the sweet gums south of the beans 

he dumps the mulch and rakes it level. 

I know the work he does. What I see 

is a man bent over a handle, rocking 

in rhythm, drawing it to his chest 

as if saying goodbye to it one more time, 

then casting it at arm’s length 

so he can say it over and over, 

until it needs no more saying. 

He pulls the wheelbarrow back up the drive. 

A yellow butterfly flits about his shoulders. 

He keeps his head low 

and passes close, his eyes cast down 

as if daily work were prayer, 

dirt stains on the belly of his shirt.

Winner of the Sumter County, SC, Literary Prize. First published in Tar River Poetry; rptd. in Keep and Give Away (University of South Carolina Press, 2006). 

The Day after Visiting Grace, 94

Hillsborough, NC

The deer near the edge of the woods

look in the window. They seem to know me.

Three of them have stopped 

summer’s clock. The tiger swallowtails 

on the buddleia open their wings to purple.

The ones on the privet lie still as blossoms.

Crows have gathered on the ground,

a small and shifting jury of discontent.

The buddleia are pale, past their peak. 

Does the air, humid and gray, 

move in closer? The largest crow

is insistent about it, in a yard full of green 

on the verge of turning yellow. 

Grace, what I wish for you today,

another Better Boy tomato, fresh  

from the small garden of someone you know,

peeled and cut into chunks, placed in a bowl

for you, bibbed, in your wheelchair.

May you take your fork,

with your good arm, to eat each wedge

of pulp, then lift the bowl,

as you said you’d do, to drink

the settlement of seeds, letting a few 

run down your chin, on your tongue

the last drops of juice, a quenching.

First published in North Carolina Literary Review.

A poem written during a trip to Florida, where you might see a parakeet somewhere other than inside a cage.

Dear Black-Hooded Parakeets

at the Intersection

The dark-&-slightest-green of you 

mimics pigeons on the wire. 

Against the light I can’t tell

and habit’s got the best of me 

until I look again and see, I swear,  

not pigeons but a sudden flutter

of pistachios, limes, tourmaline  

bandits caped and quilled—

bright, then brighter, filling the sky.

I’m arrival and departure.  

Foolish doubletake, cautionless 

and agog. You are morning, its jig 

of surprise, hello-goodbye,  

hallelujah free and featherborne. 


First published in Subtropics.
 

Her book Keep and Give Away was published by the University of South Carolina Press in 2006 after being selected by Terrance Hayes for the inaugural South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, sponsored by the press and the SC Poetry Initiative. Keep and Give Away also won the 2007 Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) Book Award for Poetry and the Brockman-Campbell Book Award. Her chapbook Lessons in Leaving received the 1998 Persephone Press Book Award, judged by Brendan Galvin. Her poetry has also been published in The Southern Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Crazyhorse,  jubilat, Subtropics, and other journals, as well as online at Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. For the past three years her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. 

Keep and Give Away can be ordered through these sources:

·      University of South Carolina Press:http://www.sc.edu/uscpress/books/2006/3670.html

·      Amazon.com

·      Barnes and Noble

·      Various independent bookstores