PoetryMagazine.com

Margo Taft Stever
 USA




Margo Taft Stever’s chapbook, The Hudson Line was published by Main Street Rag (2012). Her first full-length collection, Frozen Spring, was the winner of the Mid-List Press First Series Award for Poetry (2002). Her chapbook, Reading the Night Sky (Introduction by Denise Levertov), won the Riverstone Poetry Chapbook Competition (1996). Her book, Looking East: William Howard Taft and the 1905 U.S. Diplomatic Mission to Asia, co-authored by James Taft Stever, was published by Zhejiang University Press (2012). Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in magazines and anthologies including The Webster Review, Rattapallax, New England Review, West Branch, The Seattle Review, Prairie Schooner (forthcoming) and Blackbird (forthcoming). She is the founder of The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center (www.writerscenter.org) and founding editor of Slapering Hol Press. Ms. Stever has read her poetry at numerous locations, including the Geraldine Dodge Poetry Festival, the Blacksmith House, and the Shanghai  International Studies University. She lives in Sleepy Hollow, New York (www.margostever.com).




Conversation
with Bertolt Brecht

Solely because of the increasing disorder
in our cities of class struggle,
some of us have now decided
to speak no more of cities by the sea, 
snow on roofs,  women...
                                             Brecht
  

As if the Chilean songs of revolution
would bring back the gray fishing boats
sailing through frail, deepening waters
at dawn and the seagulls making earthly sounds.
As if these songs could restore the balance,
the driven leaf, nail old
and rusted, shoved through the bent bough.

Each step through mirrors brings us
back to the pitch of sleeplessness,
the unstrung dream, an oil slick
on an ocean still and black.
As if all the songs of revolution
could bring the murmuring tree back,
could restore wind to the rigging,
full sail to the morning light.

How many years, messages, wars,
strange incidences, ironies?
The wary eye of the mother
wanted to protect her child,
promise more, cities near the sea,
clear waters, full sail, 
the morning light. 



First published in New England Review. Also, published in the anthology, Voices for Peace Anthology, edited by Barbara Nector Davis, the chapbook, Reading the Night Sky, by Margo Taft Stever and the book, Frozen Spring, by Margo Taft Stever.

 

 

 

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