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Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry: Eel-Grass and Sixty-Five Degrees
Edited and introduced by Wesley McNair, Maine Poet Laureate
Today, two poets celebrate spring: Edna St. Vincent Millay, born in Rockland, who writes of the coast, and Nancy Henry, a resident of Westbrook, who describes April in the Maine interior.
Eel-Grass by Edna St. Vincent Millay
No matter what I say, All that I really love Is the rain that flattens on the bay, And the eel-grass in the cove; The jingle-shells that lie and bleach At the tide-line, and the trace Of higher tides along the beach: Nothing in this place.....
Sixty-Five Degrees by Nancy A. Henry
In April, we hike in from the back orchard after our winter of white-birch austerity.All is pandemonium: frog-muddy boot-sucking swamp earth, crumblemoss log, shelf-lichen, salamander, centipede, snowmelt shadow-hollow, fly-keening backwoods lowland, messy fertile celebration and head-swimming hymn to spring.
Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. The first poem is in the public domain. The second poem is copyright © 2010 Nancy A. Henry. Reprinted from Favorites from the first fifteen years, Encircle Publications, 2010, by permission of Nancy A. Henry. Questions about submitting to Take Heart may be directed to Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, Special Consultant to the Maine Poet Laureate, at mainepoetlaureate@gmail.com or 207-228-8263. Take Heart: Poems from Maine, an anthology collecting the first two years of this column, is now available from Down East Books.