In our final week of posting contest entries from the fall/winter WIR writing contest, we have six poems by Linda M. Robertson. Our contest judge Sharon Bryan wrote this about selecting these poems as winners:
These poems speak in a voice that makes me want to listen to everything it says. They are so well-crafted that the surfaces seem simple and the tone conversational, heart-to-heart. But they speak of losses, brutality, and finding comfort where we can: “I rest against a ruined/ chapel wall, lean/ into its certain charity.” And of course we also find this in poems that transform human emotions into art–that provide, as Frost said, “a momentary stay against confusion.”
Linda knows she learned to love Poetry (a word she always capitalizes), by listening to her mother’s recitations of Tennyson, Wordsworth and Frost, during San Diego beach walks. While raising a young family in the remote Methow Valley in the North Cascades of Washington State, she completed several University of Washington Distance Learning classes in Poetry and has been on a Poetry journey ever since. In 2011, at the age of 56, she entered Chatham University’s Low-Residency MFA Program: a unique writing program with emphasis on Nature, Environment and Travel Writing. She continues to write poems, attend workshops and literary festivals, and travel.
For a week in August 2016, she lived and wrote with Irish and American poets at Anam Cara Writer’s and Artist’s Retreat on the Beara Peninsula, Ireland. She has just recently returned to the Pacific Northwest from England and Galway, Ireland’s week-long International Festival of Literature. She continues to revise and expand her Master’s Thesis, a manuscript, The Missing, and hopes to publish it one day.
For this article, Linda sent notes about each of her poems along with this epigraph, a quote from poet George Barker: “The world is my wonder…”
About the first of her poems, “Blessings for the New Year,” Linda writes:
“Blessings for the New Year” began as something quite different – “Bless the Book Yet to Be Written.” As I reread and re-envisioned this draft, I decided to change the intention of the poem. It certainly is a response to the need for “blessings” so many of us felt as 2016 turned towards 2017.
Blessings for the New Year
May starfields swell the apparent
horizon, borders vanish at dawn.
May wings press against words—
blue in a sudden rain.
May there be beauty in every ruin:
small petals blooming among cleft
rock. May there be roads beyond
memory of maps, bridges across
rivers that carry their stones.
May there be saints.
About the next two poems, Linda tells us:
The first drafts of “A Pilgrim’s Way” and “A Letter from the Allihies Mine, Beara” were written at Anam Cara Writer’s and Artist’s Retreat in Ireland, during a week-long workshop with poet Leanne O’Sullivan.
A Pilgrim’s Way
Kilkenney
One swan seeks the river’s
edge. A broad path follows
the leafed sky. I turn
to cross a soft field
beneath unfamiliar
clouds. Always
a trail before me
as I travel alone,
thankful for hedges of fuchsia
that bloom, illustrating
their season. If there is
light in this world beyond
our sun, they offer it.
I rest against a ruined
chapel wall, lean
into its certain charity.
A Letter from the Allihies Mine, Beara
For Tommy
For forty years you lived the sea:
salt-wind, a well provisioned
boat, sails taut with sun.
You memorized the name
and job of every part:
jib halyard, stanchion and
lifeline, keel and anchor.
You learned to read charts;
to find your way with a compass.
This was before your drifting.
Now, words are lost to the currents
and the sky is damp with last year’s
tears, though you hardly notice.
I stand above wind-worn sea
on Irish hills shrouded with heather
and stone. Here, men mined the green
earth for copper: delved deeply towards
its center; gouged its soul for wages.
The hand-hewn clefts are scarred with tales
of candles snuffed by breathless depths; of saints
and whiskey; of heartbreak and ruined health.
Brother, where are you going?
I think of you slipping down a shaft
of forgetting, and like men lost to those
caves hundreds of meters below seabed—you too
crushed by darkness without light enough
to find a way out.
Linda says:
“On Newton Road” was drafted while I was visiting my daughter in Royal Tunbridge Wells, England.
On Newton Road
(Tunbridge Wells, England)
wind.
brick and mortar, caulk and double-glaze.
the sash closed fast, the handle locked.
yet the bedroom door still wafts
searching for the hand that won’t decide:
open or shut.
Linda describes the motivation for her next poem this way:
“As We Read Your Many Names in the Sanctuary” is an attempt to address the sense of horror and tragedy that filled the Fellowship Sanctuary while the many names of the murdered were read. I hope that this poem honors each of these persons who, just like us, were “…born into earth, fire, water,/ air. Your brilliant eyes did shine.”
As We Read Your Many Names in the Sanctuary
Transgender Day of Remembrance,
Quimper Unitarian Universalist Fellowship
14 or 17 or 24 or 47 or 64
years or stab wounds or gun-
shots. Slit throat, dumped
off a bridge, dragged by
a car. Trampled. Beaten
beyond recognition.
Knife. Gun. Rope. Hands.
Each complicit.
Austin. DC. Sao Paulo.
Cuernavaca. Los Angeles. Rome.
You, born into earth, fire, water,
air. Your brilliant eyes did shine.
We did not know your face or place
as you lived breast-bound, bullied,
lonely as a shallow grave. No one
near to ambush the violence stalking you.
We say your names
Noony. Jazz. Crystal. Dee.
Amos. Maya. Simon. Mercedes.
Jasmine. Brandi. TT. Kayden.
Lexi. Keyonna. Sierra.
beneath two metal circles
on the wall, a flame inside
their curves that will not
be doused, extinguished,
diffused. We remember you.
Remember you.
And about the last of her winning poems Linda writes:
“Waking at 3 a.m. Thinking of Your Letter From Kaktovik” uses many words from a letter from my friend who was working in Kaktovik and had gone several times to closely observe polar bears among whale carcasses. I worked to extend the imagery of this place, and to evoke its wonder. Because I meant this to be a bit dream-like (3 a.m.) I pushed against the logical, the linear.
Waking at 3 a.m. Thinking of Your Letter From Kaktovik
for Jill
Bone pile sun, sea of skulls. Nothing
but the cracked glass of stars between
your heartbeat and a paw. Massive
white bears swim squandered
dusk-light. Bowhead whales are not
frightened; they are dead.
The bears suck and gnash at ribs,
the graveled air. All worlds fall into fog.
Musk of caribou gnaws the shore.
Currents carry gun shots, shouts. Dawn
listens to salmon, the hesitant seals.
One truck spooks the timid hour. You,
my friend, approach alone; and I
who have not breathed these bears,|
dream them.
****
Those who read Linda’s poems will most certainly dream those bears of love and of loss, too, because of what her poems have opened in us.