Amy Lowell Prize, selected by Laura Rodley
Jason O’Toole is Poet Laureate Emeritus of North Andover, MA. He serves on the advisory board of the New England Poetry Club, and as treasurer of the Independent Living Resource Center San Francisco. He is a judge for the Tom Nattell Peace Poetry Prize and the Capital District Slam Poetry Festival in NY. His newest collection is The Strange Misgivings of the Sadly Gifted (Dead Man’s Press Ink). Recent poems and prose have appeared in the anthology Love is for All of Us (Storey Publishing), as well as Ghost City Press, The Somerville Times, and Tiny Molecules.
Astropastoral (The Second Pentacle of the Sun)
Consciousness is the nature of nature
You struck up a rapport
with a praying mantis which let you
transport it around your garden
The morning after you died
it came to look for you, found me
instead weeping under the sun
You’re not in your body
you must be somewhere
why not here, among us living
things you loved, the plants
you grew from seeds, the rabbits
keeping one eye on me as they
chew the grass, the squirrels
that watch your cat on the other
side of the sliding door
as they devour rosehips
the petals already fallen
you must be somewhere
when I asked if you’d
like to travel to Venus or Mars
you said no Dad,
I like it down here
on my little green earth
Title used with permission of the poet Douglas Crase