Poets Old and New

The coffee shop is located around the corner from the Vermont Studio Center, an artist's residency where artists from all over the country (sometimes the world) come to spend time with their work. They usually come for one-month intervals and so we can rely on a somewhat transient "regular" scene at the shop. Just as I'm learning that this guy comes in every morning for a double americano in this specific mug with this much water, off he goes back to his everyday life. This past Sunday I had alot of folks stopping into the shop on their way to the Burlington airport for one last double mocha or one more dry cappuchinno. This week, even though I'm not behind the counter, I'm noticing new faces in town. I'm wondering what their drinks of choice will be. How talkative. How particular or engaging.

The Studio Center hosts regular lectures and readings by artists and writers and tonight, for the first time, I attended. I've written poetry for as long as I can remember but don't particularly enjoy reading poetry. I've never made a habit of attending poetry readings... I may have actually avoided them. I've never been interested in reading any of my own work out loud. But more than one person this week suggested I check out this week's reading by a woman named Jane Hirschfield... and I'm so glad that I did. I still don't know that much about her, where she's from, although I think it may be the Bay area in California.... I just know that every single poem she read resonated in some way, spoke to something, carried it's weight. I think it might be time to crawl out of the woodwork more often and see what's going on in the world of culture.....

More and more I have come to admire resilience.

Not the simple resilience of a pillow, whose foam

returns over and over to the same shape, but the

sinuous tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly

blocked on one side,

it turns in another.

A blind intellegence, true.

But out of such peristance arose turtles, rivers,

mitochondria, figs-- all this resinous, unretractable earth.

Jane Hirschfield

Oh, and Ella, who came along with me, became inspired to write some of her own poetry as well.....

A Dragon's Departure

Dragon's take flight

with all of their might.

They glide through the sky

as though they are swimming in water.

I am the daughter

of a king

in a castle.

I watch the dragons take flight

with might

every morning at dawn.

They swoop over the sea.

Wings go up and down in peace.

Lucky me, to see them soar.

I shut my door

and close my eyes

and hear them burst into song.

The moon comes up.

I sleep again.

Ella Loscomb:)