Featured Poet: Mimi White, Rye

This week's featured poet is Mimi White, the 2005-2007 Portsmouth Poet Laureate.  She has taught at the University of New Hampshire, Northern Essex Community College and Lesley University.  She worked for several years as a visiting poet in NH schools, libraries, prisons and residencies for the elderly.  Her work has appeared in dozens of journals which include Poetry, The Harvard Review, West Branch, Hanging Loose and Rivendell.  She is the author of two chapbooks of poetry, Into The Darkness We Go and The Singed Horizon which won the Philbrick Poetry Award.

About this poem, Mimi writes: "In the winter of 2006 five writing groups met around the city of Portsmouth to explore the theme 'What Is Home.'  A satellite group also gathered in Stockholm Sweden.  The groups met for six weeks creating poems and sharing their work.  Several members of these groups have continued to meet and work together.  In the Fall of 2006 the Portsmouth Poet Laureate program will publish a chapbook of these poems.   A selection of poems will be transformed into theater under the guidance of Pontine Movement Theater and several other will be transformed into song and sung at the fall concert by Voices from the Heart.

I’ll Build You a House

..all I want is a human window
in a house whose roof is my life.
                              Ilya Kaminsky

Here’s the orchard, here’s the leaf.
Here’s the beveled slant of dusk.
Here’s the jamb to hang the door.
Here’s the flame that heats the stone.
Here’s the rasp that smoothes the pine.
Here’s the rusty path, the crumbs,
the rot that kills the runnel’s pull.
Here’s the window, here’s the eye
the raven cast.  Here’s the granite,
here’s the latch.  Here’s the open
book, the light.  Here’s the fruit,
the bone, the seed.  I’ll raise
the house that rides the earth.
I’ll gather plums, I’ll plant my touch.
    

for Steve

• www.pplp.org