Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry: Briefly Enough and Summer

Edited and introduced by Wesley McNair, Maine Poet Laureate

Here are two poems for summer. Candice Stover of Mount Desert Island opens with a tender lyric about a moment that is, as she puts it, “suspended between sleep and waking.” In a second lyric, Jacob Fricke of Belfast takes up the same theme.

Briefly Enough by Candice Stover

this morning light trembled
through my lashes
as I drifted in and out
of sleep, cheek resting
on my love’s chest

I could follow every breath

a breeze passing over our bodies moved
like another breath, another
kind of breathing, until it seemed
we were drowsing on an open vessel
on a body of water we did not need to name

Summer by Jacob Fricke (for Jennifer Hickey)

I touched the face of midnight once
though it was scarcely noon—
the breezes ghost-like in the grass
presented their perfume.

I fell on fields beneath the sky
and summer was my bed,
the heat and shade for counterpane,
the ground to cup my head.

Then — sweet, sweet, sweet my falling lid —
the skies began to close,
and blank before my sluggish eyes,
a world for my repose.

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Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. First poem copyright © 2010 Jacob Fricke. Reprinted from This Book of Poems You Found, The Illuminated Sea Press, 2010, by permission of Jacob Fricke. Second poem copyright © 2007 Candice Stover. Reprinted from Poems from the Pond, Deerbrook Editions, 2007, by permission of Candice Stover. Questions about Take Heart, which is no longer accepting submissions, 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.