April 2018
Penny Harter
penhart@2hweb.net
In 2002, after eleven years living in Santa Fe (a mid-life leap after living most of our lives in NJ), my late husband Bill Higginson and I moved back to northern NJ to be closer to family again. Grandchildren started being born, plus we missed our kids. After Bill died in 2008, I moved again, down to the South Jersey shore area to be near my daughter and her family. I am about a forty-minute drive inland, on winding country roads, from the Atlantic Ocean.

I'm in my seventies now (already!) and have weathered the loss of my husband, as well as various health challenges since Bill died, but I'm still here and doing well, thank God. Being able to write my way through my days is a blessing. "Following our bliss," or passion, can sustain us through anything, giving us the opportunity to share and celebrate the events of our lives as we translate them back to ourselves. Once when I was wrestling with a life-changing decision, a poet friend told me "Your poems will know before you do." They did...and continue to do so!

​Of Loving You


When I try to write of loving you,
the slow sliding begins,
the horizon tilts,
and the living things float
as if a slow flood carried them
into the widening pupils of my eyes,
into me, and I recognize
the vast and fertile grasslands
in the hollow of my skull
where all the animals are warm
and grazing.

[Previously published in Lovepoems, Old Plate Press, 1991.]
  © 2018 Penny Harter
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