Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry: Sixty

Edited and introduced by Wesley McNair, Maine Poet Laureate

We end the year with a love poem by the late Philip Booth of Castine. With his characteristic brevity, Booth pays tribute to the constancy of love, despite the passage of time.

Sixty by Philip Booth

Spring hills, dark contraries:
a glade in a fall valley,
its one flower steeped with sun.
The there and here of her.
The soft where.
The sweet closeness of when.
From dreams awake to turn to her.
Remembering, remembering.
And now again. Again.


Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 1999 by Philip Booth. Reprinted from Lifelines, Penguin Publishing, 1999, by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Questions about submitting to Take Heart may be directed to David Turner, Special Assistant to the Maine Poet Laureate, at poetlaureate@mainewriters.org or 207-228-8263.