At night, I took student Kathleen Morris out to dinner with Corrigan Scholar Max Limric. They both edited the Fairfield Mirror and impressed me as students and future change makers. Kathleen one the Digital Humanities Award in English for a project she did in Young Adult Literature. We met at Lil' Pub in Short Beach, where I heard about her job interview in Boston and caught up with Max's post-graduate school plans.
I loved yesterday's #VerseLove prompt...a Golden Hinge, where you take one line from a poem as your first line, and then trickle the same line down the left hand side. Sticking with my Long Island Sound motif, I went with another Whitman piece. I borrowed twice from his poem: As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life. I really liked this style.
April Whitticisms
b.r.crandall
Whoever you are, we too lie in drifts at your feet.
you, Maude, Great Whatever, teasing us. We
are gatherers of light amongst sea rocks.
we pack pens & notebooks, those snack-boxes,
too, teasing clamshells & bay scallops while others
lie in eal-grass capturing Russian Beach warriors
in clouds above (ghosts of whalers etched as first-
drafts from tap-dancing pencil tips along lined-paper).
at our feet, a low tide. To our right, a Sea Wall Cove —
your artistry is gathered through this idea, the Sound of
feet questioning death-waves as the wind picks up.
As I ebb’d with the ocean of life
I found fluidity between you, them, us, we
ebb’d in togetherness, humanity, poetry written
with coastal possibility of a Connecticut story.
the waves whispering wary death for the living. the
ocean, a scrapbook of who we once were…
of who we are right now…sandpipers bringing
life to another shore of American beach grass.
