Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize, selected by the New England Poetry Club Board
Foter’s Tog*
Whether you came because
I summoned you, as if to
an audition, or you drifted in
on your own wind’s singular
script will never be clear,
but there you were, your old
handsome self, ‘70s hair
backswept, a little silvered,
and of course I hugged you,
though you couldn’t lift your
arms much, buttoned into that
cindery, immigrant overcoat.
Your eyes were rimmed raw
from winter gusts, or the loop
of dreams—the skin so
thin there, where the soul peers
out, spilling its blue pools
before retreating again.
It was all backwards;
Mom had left you, as if
by divorce, moved on,
and your face was lit, flushed
with defeat. The arena, though,
was grand, an empty,
modern theatre, all too
silly now—just us, unfunny
father and daughter at center
stage. Desire couldn’t have
moved your feet.
In the wings, was it Gratitude
issuing no lines or cues
for me at all? Just this
dream of our greeting,
so brief, in the borderlight
before daybreak.
_____________________
*Yiddish for Father’s Day
Cemetery Craft
There is a sphere defined—
not by the city’s finite fencing
that holds the dead in (as if
mixing the traffic on macadam
with the bone trust underfoot
would undo us both, bring
souls careening to life
and the living too close to
the ones we once were).
The old gravestones are part
of the day’s angular grace,
the place a safe parcel of time
that a small gray bird who
hops here unties like a charade
artist, again and again pulling
invisible strings through grass,
to branch, and sky, opening up
the possible. Impossible to name,
this acre; the heart aches—
inheritance is its own infinite
argument, but these granite
partisans aren’t pathetic
caring things, know nothing
of brevity or atrocity, or how
crumbling the one walking,
how laughably cyclical her
sorrow. Here stand blind
guardians of the fictional sphere
a dirt road passes through.
Here, the lime grass is crowded
with buzzing flurries,
and grainy shadows turn
granite flesh to the slow slap
of sun—so, for a while,
the sting of the past and future
is lost to acts of impartial light.
Wayfarer
for Dean
To say I sail would not account for my whereabouts,
or suggest the horizon is evident, or the north star
to be found. Wind rustles and retreats, and it’s
entirely commonplace to find me plying
headlong into the froth of my own wake.
I do gaze. Distance is something I debate
as I dream, awake in ambient brine next to you.
Next to you I clang bells at the moon’s milk-load
of wattage. I pay a medium toll for mixing up
stern and bow, mast and staff, suggestible (gullible)
and suggestive (evocative). Sank, sunk, etc., et alia.
But as I fumble metaphors in the lee of the licks
and in the Milky Way’s way, your field tenders
its miracle magnet, tugging me through Cabo-de-Hornos blows,
ensuring I skirt shoalings wending home.
Sara London is the author of Upkeep and The Tyranny of Milk, both published by Four Way Books. She teaches at Smith College, and is the poetry editor at The Woven Tale Press. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including The Common, The Hudson Review, Poetry East, The Iowa Review and the Poetry Daily anthology. She has also authored two children’s books. saralondonwriter.com