After a year away, Billy Collins returned to the Featherstone Center for the Arts on Tuesday evening to a hero’s welcome.

At a recent event at the Katharine Cornell Theatre I was crowned Martha’s Vineyard poet laureate, succeeding Lee McCormack. I was given a two-year term, a plastic laurel wreath and a toga.

Fanny Howe, whose latest book of poetry, Second Childhood, was nominated for the National Book Award, suggests that readers not try to understand her poems but rather just listen to the music of the words and images. Her collection centers around "the convergence between old age and childhood."

Gay Head Light

In Memoriam: Todd Follansbee

Nothing gay this gray morning.
The salt-sprayed trees
and bushes bend over
like scared students,
tested by a towering teacher —
all brick, iron and glaring
glass — missing nothing.

I have learned a new word, a noun, the pull-by.

I stand as the black water

Of each wave’s backwash

Hugs my hip boots

Making little stars of light

The fish-filled night.

Early on I was hoping for a strike

Of some huge striped bass to fight,

But now, to hell with fishing,

I would rather stand here casting.

The ground is thawing. And now the sun has reached an angle of amber upon the bees.

LAX creates somniacs or worse.
Promised wifi is a lie. We lay
to wait connection, a continuation home.

Winter solstice was hardly a comfort, for those of us who suffer from SAD while enduring our endless days fading daylight.

I appreciate the prayers and kindness shown to me and my family during my daughter’s illness. So happy to be back on-Island. So grateful. The following by Naomi Shihab Nye, from The Words Under the Words: Selected Poems, captures perfectly my sentiment at this time.