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Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry: From Under Mount Blue
Edited and introduced by Wesley McNair, Maine Poet Laureate
Poet Henry Braun lives in a wilderness far from neighbors in the middle of Mount Blue State Park. These two excerpts from his longer poem ?Under Mount Blue? describe his life there.
From Under Mount Blue by Henry Braun
Reading Late
Some evenings fragility lays itself out on roads from the novel you are reading, old peculiar enlargements that keep you wakeful long after the book closes. Someone was alive whom you followed by oil lamp for hours through the pages and now, in a quiet house, everyone breathing must be looked at and more than looked at, accompanied.
Firewood Sermon
Sticks of wood are personalities like dogs and cats, but simpler. One hisses with the rain garnered slowly on a woodpile. One cackles cackles groans and falls to its side. Two, brought near strike up an acquaintance in the burning world.
Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poems copyright © 2006 Henry Braun. Reprinted from Loyalty: New and Selected Poems, Off the Grid Press, 2006, by permission of Henry Braun. 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.