The Sunday Poet: Mark Stevick

       

Poet Mark Stevick

LYRICAL SOMERVILLE

EDITED BY DOUG HOLDER

Mark Stevick is a professor of Creative Writing at Gordon College in Wenham, MA.

                       Lingering

There are flowers   looking something like

red   it is dusk   trunks of pine like

black rivulets down a faint pane   one

planet   these flowers   petunias?

leaning over rails   begonias?   what

has happened?   who has been taken?

they are looking   looking   like cartoon

crowds   are they dahlias?   still the pines

blacken   there is nothing they can do

they are keeping it up   look they are

wringing their hands   they are impatiens.

                 This Birch

Civility rises as this birch

lifts its face, and stretches.

There is remembrance in these limbs,

of wind, and rain, and mute kisses.

All the gestures of the branches say

the gifts I bring must be refused.

Let this tree be dressed as light allows;

let it be white amid dark boughs.