The Sunday Poet: Paul Marion

Poet Paul Marion

Paul Marion has been a writer and community activist since the 1970s. He is the author of several collections of poetry as well as the editor of the early writings of Jack Kerouac, Atop an Underwood, and other titles. His recent book Mill Power tells the story of the innovative national park in Lowell, Massachusetts, and the city’s acclaimed revival, a model for small industrial cities everywhere. His work has appeared in anthologies and literary journals such as Alaska Quarterly Review and The Massachusetts Review. In 1978 he created Loom Press, a small publishing company that promotes writing from the Merrimack River Valley. Among other accomplishments on the community front, he co-founded the Lowell Folk Festival and Lowell Heritage Partnership, an alliance of people and organizations whose mission is to care for architecture, nature, and culture.  His latest collection of poetry is Union River.

From Union River: Poems and Sketches by Paul Marion (Bootstrap Press, 2017)

The Yellow Gate

We crossed Harvard Square at twilight.

Bluegrass troubadours caught coins in an alley.

Our lemonade at the Café Algiers was tall and sour.

We kept our voices down. At slim tables

Night’s royalty sipped pomegranate soda.

New Yorker couples puffed twin thin cigars.

A temptress who could have ruled a sandy country

Ordered a cup of goat yogurt, and next door

Jugglers tossed fire outside the place with the yellow gate:

Women upstairs would peal sheer grace if they were bells.

A man stretches muscle strings into a physical region

Where the dance will decide what the body can do.

In this great well of action, rhythm bounds out of beings

As if they were trees releasing their inner rings.