Featured Poet: Priscilla Burlingham, Moultonborough

A graduate of The Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston her poetry was first encouraged while on painting fellowships at Ragdale and Yaddo.  She had always written alongside painting, and in the middle 90s, poetry had taken over as her major medium.  Since moving to NH she has sparked poetry readings in North Country libraries, and has gathered talent from all over New England to read monthly next to city, state and United States poets laureate at the Moultonborough Public Library.  Writing almost without pause in her studio on her pond in the Lakes Region, she keeps her land as a sanctuary for wildlife, grows plants from seed, and thinks alot about applied physics, the planets and components of survival.  The few poems that have appeared in anthologies are from her 2010 published book, A Finer Reach.

This poem came out of a great respect for creatures whose energies are best spent on survivial to replenish.  It is easy to see why they were mythologized as symbols of power and hope and when we pay attention we may find they are guiding us still.

Renewal

All week the wind
redundant
a chorus of homeless leaves
blown and reblown
like paper lemmings
coughed up
from ground
to nickel light

On metallic rivers
the sky has frowned
for days
signalling fish
rubied and green gold
to scrape plump bellies
of roe and milt
their fry to sway
in jelly wombs
on stone

And undistrubed
in his mineral keep
the scarlet newt surrounds
his fingerless nub with cells
of pink
lush and safe with growing
as if the dark
was all he needed
to be immortal