January 2016
Carolyn Martin
portlandpoet@gmail.com
portlandpoet@gmail.com
After forty years in the business and academic worlds, I am blissfully retired in Clackamas, OR, where I garden, write and play with creative friends. Since the only poem I wrote in high school was red-penciled "extremely maudlin," I'm still amazed I continue to write. My poems have appeared in journals throughout the US and UK, and my second collection, The Way a Woman Knows, was released in February 2015 by The Poetry Box, Portland, OR. I don't have any pets, but I do have a partner who is so much more creative than I am.
All I need
A few skyward things: one steady star
to guide, one constellation to bet
a myth upon, one quasar to break
the dark. The rest is ornament.
One mountain to announce it’s ripe
for bulbs and seeds to multiply
without a first or second thought.
Birth deserves tranquility.
A frenzy of birds at sleeptide’s ebb,
tornados of gnats at dusk’s flow.
Two feral cats. Two red-tailed hawks.
Days that warrant wilding up.
A word for grace or luck or hope
when the mountain blocks my star.
In-the-bone love for all that’s lost.
Something born to lead me home.
“All I need” was first published in Carolyn Martin, The Way a Woman Knows.
©2016 Carolyn Martin