Miriam Sagan is the author of over thirty books of poetry, fiction, and memoir. Her most recent include Castaway (Red Mountain, 2023) and A Hundred Cups of Coffee (Tres Chicas, 2019). She is a two-time winner of the New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards as well as a recipient of the City of Santa Fe Mayor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts and a New Mexico Literary Arts Gratitude Award. She has been a writer in residence in four national parks, Yaddo, MacDowell, Gullkistan in Iceland, Kura Studio in Japan, and a dozen more remote and interesting places. She works with text and sculptural installation as part of the mother/daughter creative team Maternal Mitochondria (with Isabel Winson-Sagan) in venues ranging from RV parks to galleries. She founded and directed the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College until her retirement. Her poetry was set to music for the Santa Fe Women’s Chorus, incised on stoneware for two haiku pathways, and projected as video inside an abandoned building during the pandemic under the auspices of Vital Spaces.

Ring-of-Fire

Miriam Sagan

We went up to San Isidro campground
to see the annular eclipse.
The gate was unlocked,
kids were running about, with dogs,
I drank a cup of hot tea
from my son-in-law
in the RV. We had NASA-approved
glasses, and welding goggles
and sat in our lawn chairs
all pointing in the same direction
like the heads on Easter Island.

My four-year old granddaughter
yelled: “It’s starting”
and had a longer
attention span
than I’d predicted. After all
at some point, everyone turned away
and you told me to look behind us
to see Venus shining
as the sky darkened.

And then some of the kids
who’d been watching the eclipse projection
got bored
and one boy put the cardboard box
over his head
and biked around blind
except for the tiny pinhole
through which we’d expected to see
the universe.

***

something untamable—
and not kind—
wild bird of prey or
one that feeds on carrion
its cramped wings
rattle a cage of bone
in my chest
my ribs its prison bars

I can’t feed it
and yet its hunger
fills my throat
I fear its wants
its struggle, its
desire to kill or
should I sympathize
with any feathered
creature’s urge
to fly

 — Miriam Sagan

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