Poems
During April, in recognition of National Poetry Month, The Martha's Vineyard Times will publish selected work of Island poets.
Lilacs again
By Rose Styron
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Photo by Susan Safford
June: French lilacs
lavender and prim
follow our wild white
beauties lost to May
as later lovers
circumspect and trim
follow escaping wings.
I would stay
high on that whitest fragrance
yearlong were it not
that each fresh bud's an
arrow tip, heart shot.
Breathless
By Rose Styron
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Another April come and gone
so quick
my breath is still
somewhere in a greening tree
halfway up the hill,
somewhere in a robin's nest,
or on the pond-wet log
where I was watching something change
from tadpole into frog.
Or is it, still, where crocuses
bloomed in the lacy dew?
or near a downy caterpillar,
lost when spring was new?
Oh, March was long with waiting
when the sighing world was chill
but now
another April's gone
so quick my breath is still.
Whiteness
By Rose Styron
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Every April when our plum tree
spreads its wings in wedding bloom
I am again obsessed by whiteness-
whiteness, rhyme, and Rome.
But April's over the hill this year,
and I have promised not to rhyme,
and Rome where love began again so often
is abandoned.
Whiteness remains: obsessions: tall
sails rounding East Chop harbor,
clouds flotillas through my kites,
swans racketing above the dunes,
bleached alligator skeleton and
paper butterfly washed up from the
Okavanga on the long white
breakers that devour my shore.
Or, summer slipped away: a wide
verandah rocking to Virginia,
white pillars holding up the James,
Polly's commencement dress fluttering
in the attic storeroom whose window
will not close this autumn, strands
of a memoried grandmother's
unpinned hair. Even
the ice that held our skateblades up
is disappearing under snow,
knobbed white-stocking birches
our replacement.
Tomorrow, what shall I do
with whiteness? What is there about
mortality, immortality, when great
white birds take wing? Memory walks
a Himalayan ridge, between high
spaces, old friend standing
on the last field-edge behind me
counting disappearing yaks,
old friend striding oblivious ahead
toward Nivana, each of us balancing his own
present destiny
in Bhutan's white kingdom,
Buddha's tiger waiting
at the monastery, snow falling,
falling, white and unseen cranes
asleep below.
To waste these days! The wind
still shimmering each high bouquet,
--these nights! The Milky Way,
old Pegasus who dives outside my
window, scattering moonlit seeds
white on the farthest wave.
Sheer curtains billow, but I cannot
close the casement on such fantasy.
Poet, journalist, and human rights activist Rose Styron of Vineyard Haven has published three books of poetry: "From Summer to Summer," "Thieves Afternoon," and "By Vineyard Light." She currently serves as a fellow at Harvard University Institute of Politics.
Pruning
By Justen Ahren
Working my way from the newest growth back,
I come to the healed scars of past
cuts my mother made circling these bushes
in patched jeans. How did she chose, alone
in the damp, March fog before crocuses
when it is difficult to believe anything
can come from the branches we leave, let alone
blue, sweet berries that snap open in the mouth?
Without encouragement, without embrace,
I do as she taught me, sacrifice the weak,
useless branches I figure won't amount too much.
I snip them and let them drop at my feet, remembering
as I do, the lame bull she tended, twice a day
turning him on the straw with the blanket
padded bucket of a tractor and, too,
the quiet boy who stretched her sweater
afraid to disturb her work, and who grew forgotten
like the corners of the house. How is it she decided
she could live without a thing long loved
and carried in her dreams through winter?
West Tisbury resident Justen Ahren is the director Martha's Vineyard Writers Residency. He received a MFA from Emerson College in 2003. His work has appeared in many literary journals, most recently in Fulcrum.
