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Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry: Faith
Edited and introduced by Wesley McNair, Maine Poet Laureate
According to the old expression, seeing is believing. But in this week’s hopeful poem for the new year, Robert Chute of Poland Spring shows that believing can be seeing.
Faith by Robert M. Chute
I’ve never found an arrowhead, one flinty chip of history. Young Thoreau, they said, if he walked by some farmer’s fresh plowed field, could just stoop down and pick one up. As if the spirit that had shaped them drew them up to his attention. Stoney bread crumbs no birds will eat, these points and flakes led him from the town into the saving woods and wilderness, marked the path to a wildness which might save us all. His faith led him on to find what he believed. We find, he said, what we are prepared to see.
Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2012 Robert M. Chute. Reprinted from Favorites From the First Fifteen Years, Encircle Publications LLC, 2012, by permission of Robert M. Chute. 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.