Uni-Verse

1.
I am too shy to bend over to look
their small, expectant faces in the eye,
though this team of them appeared,
suddenly, just off the sidewalk, as if
to beckon me closer, urge
me to take a moment
to hear their small truths.
And they do not ask
for much -- they require so
little in order to bloom --
that if I listened, all I'd hear
would be show us the sun
and we will turn our heads
to face it. I glance away, then,
my ears cocked forward, waiting
for something that I think
is more important.

2.

At your kitchen table, that epi-
center of power, that conduit whose dark
wooden veins run between us,
I am talking to you
about the day's events, nothing
in particular, but my upturned face
feels no warmth, the room
darkens just slightly, and the lines
cross and crackle --
enough for me to stop
talking and wonder whether you know
how this works, the sensitivity
of the current which runs both
ways, racing towards you,
then back to me,
and back, and forth, until the lines
run clear, open, until the right kind
of spark occurs, but I
do not know how it works, either.

3.

I wait, but all the while I am rushing
around -- telling myself I am patient,
I am strong, I am doing nothing
wrong -- and in my frantic seeking I miss
those small truths
blooming on my sidewalk, waiting
in their own way. But they do not bloom
forever, and I continue
to look for something else,
for connection with you, if you would only
listen, if you were only
perfect, like I sometimes think I am. Soon
the summer heat will come raging
in, forcing us into action, whether or not
we are ready, and then
I will wish I had listened, then
I will pine for the cool
messages of spring, for the patient
violets, which are almost
gone now, my love.

Molly MacLeod grew up in Bucksport and and now lives in New Jersey where she is studying for a doctorate in ecology and evolution. Her poem "Permission" won the Swedenborg Foundation's Bailey Prize for 2007.

Bangor Daily News, May 14, 2012

"Damn it! Confound this thing!
Anna, how do you turn the damn thing on?"
His first computer. A well-meaning friend
thought he could use an old one while he learned.

No learning taking place this Saturday.
He smokes and paces, implores help from above.
She hates it when he acts this way,
pretends she doesn't hear him, goes away.

I try to intercede, not knowing much
about it either, but I can get by.
"User name? Password?" Already I'm defeated.
"Anna!" he cries, one last time. Disappears.

... This is all fantasy, of course. Dead many years
before "computer" was a household word,
he wrote poems on random scraps of paper,
left them for us to see when morning came.

He read at night, prodigiously.
History, northern orchids, poetry,
Housman, Kipling, Chesterton, Millay,
he shared it all.

Telling, not conversation, was his gift:
maker of bright remarks, writer of plays,
leader of bog walks, finder of pitcher plants,
his follower a child.

Cell phones, iPods would have done him in,
too shy, non-technical, deaf in later years.
Maybe it's good he left us when he did,
for his sake, not for mine.

Ellen Richards of Bangor is a writer and teaches at the Hammond Street Senior Center. Her new collection of poems is "Not in a Book."

Bangor Daily News, April 23, 2012

As May may, we may fall
As leaves do, or not at all;
As pines pine, we may weep
As clouds do when leaves may fall;
As clouds crowd, we may leave
As fall does when winter calls.

Kiersta Recktenwald was born in Farmington, Maine, grew up in Japan and currently lives in Vienna, Maine. Her poems have appeared in Atlas Poetica, Modern English Tanka, and Poetry Midwest.

Bangor Daily News, April 30, 2012