August 20 is the deadline to sign up for the online open mic August 23.
Stand here and there, old Vineyard homes,
All wrapped in deep content.
— Emma Mayhew Whiting
They’re painting all the houses white in Edgartown,
capping flat pickets to fences around resplendent lawns,
cut on a diagonal. The parade is just around the corner.
Sit at the spinning wheel in the keeping room, scrimshaw
on the mantel. The crane swings in the high fireplace
and the streets are filled with shouts for
Joe Cressy
Salty and scholarly
Haltingly clear
What Joe Cressy spoke
You wanted to hear
Scottish and kilted
Malt in his hand
Reciting keenly
So Scots understand
Heeling on Halcyon
Bound for the sky
Cresting and leaning
A tear in his eye
Mary and daughters
Jane’s Beautiful Soul
to experience the Vineyard’s magical majesty
to see the idiosyncracies of each backyard tree
to look at our Island’s night sky as always new
to talk to her dog, Mac, as though to me and you
in one of Jane’s poems entitled My Trees
she hears “screeching sound of saws on trees”
so roads can be made and houses built
in forest where she and a boy once walked
Artemis’s Caution
When you look at a deer
what do you see?
Carrier of ticks? Raider of you garden? Meat for your freezer?
Pest, scourge, rodent with antlers?
When you contemplate a deer,
the only large animal left to roam wild
in our woods, a brilliantly fired creature who bolts off
with lifted white tail, speed like a gazelle, consider
Dandelion Gone to Seed
A sphere of silvery transparency,
at the top of a silvery stem.
Perfect in its static death.
But the next wind will blow it into seedlings,
will sing every tiny seed of it into a cloud
that drifts to earth,
to make another flower,
in another spring.
— Margaret Freydberg
If You Go to Sea
If you go to sea you really must know
What to do when the wind she blows.
If weather bodes toward a nasty gale
You must, beforehand, shorten sail.
As the gale comes on and it gets quite rough
Head up to weather but don’t let sails to luff.
It’s a good idea to use a drogue
To keep the vessel under good control.
If when quite rough and stomach is sour
