Edited by Doug Holder, Arts Page Editor

This month Lyrical Somerville presents local poets Linda Haviland Conte and Mary Buchinger Bodwell. Linda is the author of “Slow As A Poem,” and the winner of a Cambridge Poetry Award. Her work has appeared in Manifold (U.K.), Ibbetson Street, Cambridge Tab, Somerville News, and other publications. Mary is a published poet, and the recipient of a Cambridge Poetry Award. (2004) She is an assistant professor of English at the Mass. College of Pharmacy.

Both poets will appear Aug. 13 at the Toast Lounge as part of the Somerville News@Toast series.

Doug Holder http://www.authorsden.com/douglasholder.

Child Home

My children may walk through the rooms of this house
for the rest of their lives, as I go through my childhood home
time and time again in my mind.

Or they may not cling to ceiling cracks and newel posts
as I do. Their minds may ride some futuristic monorail,
traveling at light speed, not accumulating incidental anchors.

Maybe something like sunlight scarred by a crystal
as bits of rainbow on a white wall will bring them back
from their life’s work to the home where they were surely
loved.

Linda Haviland Conte

God, Evoked by Beetles at the Cemetery

As each grain of silt, of clay, as each rotted
maple seed, capless acorn, dirty white
locust blossom, dandelion measuring the sun
each unground rock fringe of dry grass, curled
yellow leaf, dust of pollen, flattened pale ant pupa
as each of these, so are the dead buried here.
Beetle beaten and bundled, this earth carries
more weight in insects than in humans,
and mirror our lives, once furiously whole,
that delivers us to God among these broken pieces.

Mary Buchinger Bodwell