Thursday, March 5, 2015, at 7:00 pm, poets Howard Levy and Margaret Lloyd will continue the eighth season of the Collected Poets Series. Mocha Maya’s Coffee House, 47 Bridge St, Shelburne Falls, MA. ($2-5 suggested donation)

Howard Levy

Howard Levy, B.A. 1968, is the author of A Day This Lit and the newly released, Spooky Action at a Distance. His work has also appeared in such journals as The Paris Review, Poetry, Threepenny Review, and The Gettysburg Review. He has won a New York State Creative Artists Program grant and has been on the faculty at The Frost Place Festival of Poetry at Robert Frost’s home in Franconia, New Hampshire.

He lives and works in New York.

Margaret Lloyd

Margaret Lloyd was born in Liverpool, England of Welsh parents and grew up in a Welsh community in central New York State. Forged Light (Open Field Press) is her third collection of poems. Alice James Books brought out her first collection, This Particular Earthly Scene. Plinth Books published A Moment in the Field: Voices from Arthurian Legend. In addition, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press published William Carlos Williams’ Paterson:  A Critical Reappraisal. Her poetry honors include a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, fellowships to Breadloaf and to Hawthornden Castle in Scotland, and a writing residency at Yaddo where she worked on the poems in Forged Light. A poet and painter, Lloyd is Professor of English at Springfield College. More information can be found on her website:  http://www.margaretlloyd.net/.

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CLOUDS / Howard Levy

The ends of tattered cloth,
strato-cirrus slide
and rip in the sharp wind.

…………………….These wisps
move us all the more deeply
since the mark we make on the world
is, at best, a wisp
and the sadness and the beauty
of that fact fills all our books.

Ay, there’s the rub,
that tenderness is loved and praised
but floats like a cloud, breaks up
and is never there where last you saw it
or last you put it.

…………………….And it can’t, we know,
be replaced by bravura, by either of the frigates
of large billowing whites or lowering storms,
their black grey, the grime of our hold
on everything else.

*

A WORLD WANTING A VOICE / Margaret Lloyd

I wore white. Their winter boots were muddy,
but I took the children in my arms to climb
the hill home because they were tired. Three

bodies moving together like one hymn
sung slowly by a small congregation.
That was years ago in late spring.

Farmers were planting corn while the sun shone,
but out of the far corner of my eye
the magnolia blossoms looked like snow,

a snow that later fell out of the sky,
dumb and cold. Absolute in its demand.
Blinding me on that same hill where I

had struggled with the children’s weight, my mind
intent on home. A world wanting a voice.
Wanting hours, days, years; the passage of time

measured by the passing of nights, close
to words and the shifting moon. Wanting to bind
hands and eyes, to take away any choice

and send me singing into the snow, blind
and failing, leaving the first world behind.

from Forged Light (Open Field Press, 2013).