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Megan Grumbling
In her poem "Havest" the 2004 Frost Award
winner, Megan Grumbling, offers a suggestion that may startle some who choose to follow Frost in one way or another,
when she asserts "Practicality precedes myth." Her award
winning poem "To Do To beans," published
and reviewed
elsewhere on the Frost web site, illustrates that poetry can have it
both ways, a delicious supper before (or after) the poem that is
desert. Grumbling also hints at what she and her contemporaries
must do to harvest in "the spirit of Frost"-- namely have
" feet sometimes tripping on roots."
Harvest
Frost wouldn't wait, this fall, for moon
to hang her round September seal;
practicality precedes myth
in the sense and strike of that old
severance. This season, clarity
grows zen-cold; that silversteel blade
seeks the deep ways origin went,
whittles away what won't winter.
Sap ran a raw ring from each stalk.
I sawed through, prolonging the pierce
of the knife somewhere in myself
as I rent body from below.
Pain was my sole umbilical,
'til the swelling moon cut the clouds
to recall the tale of will's relent,
return and end at once at one.
Walking fields back, harvest in arms,
I saw that the truth would stumble
in the morning, cleaving to dream
as belief, to root as yet bound,
'til the chill slice of recognition
stings early through sleep to the frost
on the panes, awakening the loss
and cutting all this faith to rest.
Reap and way fell dark under the pines.
Those most tangible momenta ¬
memory, impulse ¬ led me blind
along most turnings of the trail,
and moonlight seeped to reveal the rest.
Past and instinct aligned in the light,
guiding harvest toward a graceful yield,
a story ¬ though not without
my feet sometimes tripping on roots,
my feet sometimes tripping on roots.
Megan Grumbling is author and printer of the poetry collection
To and from Deepening, a letterpress-printed chapbook. Her poem "To do to Beans" is taken from a book of poetry called
Edifice, which is currently in submission and the title poem
was awarded it the top prize in the 2004 Robert Frost
Award. Megan has received the Bluestocking Creative Writing Award from the University of New England, and her poem "Brave New Ophelia" will appear in this spring’s issue of the
MacGuffin. In 2003 Megan received her Master’s Degree in Cultural Reporting and Criticism from New York University, and is now a theater critic for the Portland Phoenix.
A recently returned native of Maine, her next projects include
Residence, a series of essays, and Booker’s Point, a poetical biography of a old-time Mainer.
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