January 2024
Sylvia Cavanaugh
cavanaughpoet@gmail.com
Bio Note: I have relocated to my hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which is about an hour south of the tiny coal-mining hamlet in Schuylkill County where my grandfather grew up. My grandfather was an art professor at Franklin and Marshall College, yet was also always inhabiting the mountains to the north.

Fence Posts
Blue snowscape in watercolor on the other side of Blue Mountain in 1951. A teal-tinted grove of spruce, hemlock, and oak slopes down across the back of the long meadow— it’s ownership delineated by a line of tilting posts strong together with wire. They cast indigo shadows beside what might be a road. The snow seeks to reclaim these ancient hills, back to the time before settlers arrived with compasses, tripods, and post-hole diggers. We used to run wild there on weekend trips from the city, the way kids in spring can feel sprung from trees and leaf molder as the grownups hang back with smiles and picnic baskets of stories. My grandfather, the artist who painted and then left his beloved Schuylkill County, blurs under the pale blanket of time. These words, my fence posts.
©2024 Sylvia Cavanaugh
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