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Somerville Bagel Bard Molly Mattfield Bennett has a new book of poetry out – so we decided to excerpt a poem from it.

Point No Point is about people who live on the edges, who travel from place to place; at home nowhere, who wander through life’s journey. It is about all of us who are outsiders, Pilgrims, immigrants, homeless on the streets, Masai on the Serengeti, those who seek enlightenment. We are all outsiders. These poems dwell in paradox: with beauty amid horror that can change in an instant from one to the other; with the light that shines through pain; that daily the bush that shelters is on fire.

Molly Mattfield Bennett has published in the journals Knock, Antioch (Seattle, WA.), Constellations, Ibbetson Street (Somerville, MA.), Off the Coast, Wilderness House Review and the Bagel Bards. For years Molly has combined writing poetry with teaching young children and their teachers, raising daughters, being a Unitarian minister’s wife and leading a writing group. She lives in Quincy, Massachusetts and is an active participant in the Boston poetry community – honored to read at the Boston Public Library during the Boston National Poetry Month Festival and to be one of three poets invited to participate at the June 2012 Jeff Male Memorial Reading at the William Joiner Institute’s Writers’ Conference, the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Speak

Of the courage of those who do not pretend

that all is well

Of those who labor

whose hands and feet move in sleep

Of the shadow figures who shuffle endless streets

past store fronts and vacant lots

Of those who sit with the suffering, days stretch

through the night – cool cloths soothe, but do not heal

Of the one million in the Diaspora from the lower 9th

of the five thousand families displaced

Speak of the stubbornness of an old man

yet again – laying tile in an intricate pattern

Everybody living in different places

All scattered, nobody together – but I ain’t about to leave

— Molly Mattfield Bennett