Winner of the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize, selected by the NEPC Board
Our Year Without Summer. 1816
Every month there was a frost.
Frozen birds fell rigid from the sky.
Shorn sheep perished where they stood.
The corn crop failed, as did the grain.
Even Mrs. Moore, who heretofore had put on airs,
bowed her head in thanks for hedgehog stew and nettles.
In June, when Prudence Lexter froze while fetching wood,
I took her seven children in, poor spindly dears.
They died all but the oldest girl, when the sickness came.
It struck us like a drunkard’s blow.
Boys took up spades to help George Franklin dig the graves,
but the stunned ground would not break.
That smooth-skinned Pastor, up from Boston,
blamed it on our sins,
on our youngsters stealing kisses
in the birches down by Black Plum Lake.
A God who wields his anger cold?
I do not hold to that.
I say we are a frail and faltering flock
cast out into this wilderness of rocks and wind.
The touch of skin to skin
is all we’ve got.
I’d rather praise the blood
than curse the heart.
The Great Flood. 1927
Here at the bend,
Pond Brook has overrun its banks.
A man in a thin black tie and high black boots
slogs from shack to shack warning us to seek high ground.
And you with your fine wife, your clean sons, your house
of high calm from which you can look down
from Buckthorn Hill, you see us, the swamp
of our town, the roads tracked out like tears
to the farmlands, some by now deep under water,
livestock bawling, drowning in rain,
rain that kills the air, leaving only itself,
more and more of itself.
I can smell your skin on the good quilt, feel
your baby swim hard in me
as if there were a river
that led all the way to the sea
The Difference Between a Year and a Lifetime
For a year you can exalt in a feather,
for a year you can forget what hit you,
forget the blade that cut through
the turpentine of mango.
For a year you can plan the party
you will throw when the year is over
or plan an assignation
at the corner of time and jasmine.
For a year you can read the headlines,
feed the sparrow,
listen for wingbeats just out of earshot,
beat the ground for earthworms,
excavate the dreams
you dreamed the year before.
For a year you can be lonely
as pajamas in the daytime, lonely
as the doorknob, lonely
as the threshold, lonely
as the light shaft
on the polished wooden floor.
You can do it for a year.
A year is just a door
you are slowly walking through,
but a lifetime is this window,
its eye,
that sky,
this wind.
Laura Budofsky Wisniewski
Laura Budofsky Wisniewski is the author of the collection, Sanctuary, Vermont (Orison Books) which won the 2020 Orison Poetry Prize and the New England Poetry Club’s 2022 Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize. She is also author of the chapbook, How to Prepare Bear (Redbird Chapbooks). She was runner up in the 2021 Missouri Review Miller Audio Prize, and winner of Ruminate Magazine’s 2020 Janet B. Mccabe Poetry Prize, the 2019 Poetry International Prize, and the 2014 Passager Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Narrative, The Missouri Review, Image, Hunger Mountain Review, American Journal of Poetry, Pilgrimage, The Examined Life and other journals. Laura lives quietly in a small town in Vermont.