This month our featured poet is Don Share. He will be reading at the Toast Lounge as part of The Somerville News@Toast Series Friday Sept. 3.

Edited by Doug Holder

Don is the curator of the Poetry Room at Harvard, where he also teaches and serves as Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review. His recent book, Union, was a finalist for the 2003 Boston Globe/PEN-New England L.L.Winship Award (the only book of poems so honored that year); other books include Seneca in English (Penguin Classics) and I Have Lots of Heart: Selected Poems of Miguel Hernández (Bloodaxe), which received a Times Literary Supplement Translation Prize and the UK Society of Authors’ Premio Valle Inclan.

He is currently finishing a critical edition of Basil Bunting, and poems from a new manuscript are forthcoming in or have appeared in Yale Review, Fulcrum, Can We Have Our Ball Back, and other places.

To have your poems considered send a short bio, and two to three poems to: Doug Holder 25 School St. Somerville, Ma. 02143 dougholder@post.harvard.edu

Easter

I ate an egg my daughter and her mother
colored and hid and carried in a basket.
Hunting for them in the yard . . . the sky
was not pink, green, purple, or royal blue.
My daughter wanted to find the eggs —
and her mother wanted her to find them —
but it wasn’t in my daughter’s nature yet
to understand hidden things or birth
in this our microcosm.

The understander

The terrors of the Lord
are in abundance again.
What is the opposite
of joie de vivre —
letting off esteem?
This fundamentalism
is killing the tigers
of art and/or prophecy.
I’m reading Either/Or,
and have discovered
Either/Or, Part 2.
There goes another teacher
I’d thought to have emulated
in this our microcosm. . .