Dr Stephen Haven – Three Short Poems

Profil Stephen Haven Live Encounters Poetry & Writing May 2017Download PDF Here

Three Short Poems by Dr Stephen Haven

Stephen Haven is the author of The Last Sacred Place in North America (2012), selected by T.R. Hummer as winner of the New American Press Poetry Prize. He has published two previous collections of poetry, Dust and Bread (Turning Point, 2008), for which he was named 2009 Ohio Poet of the Year, and The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks (University of New Mexico/West End Press, 2004). He is also author of the memoir The River Lock: One Boy’s Life Along the Mohawk (Syracuse University Press, 2008). www.amazon.com/stephenhaven

Haven spent two years as a Fulbright Senior Lecturer in American Poetry at universities in Beijing. He has received residency fellowships at Yaddo, MacDowell, The Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and at the Djerassi Foundation, and five Individual Excellence Awards in Poetry from the Ohio Arts Council. He has twice taught as a writer in residence at the Chautauqua Institute and his poems have appeared in The Southern Review, American Poetry Review, Parnassus, Literary Imagination, Crazyhorse, Guernica, Salmagundi, and in many other journals. He is Director of the Lesley University MFA Program in Creative Writing, in Cambridge, MA.


Wheelbarrow

This parched pterodactyl
Tucked wings extended backward
Stoops at a drainage ditch
In Ashland, Ohio.


Upstate New York Hymn

How could I ever, ever forget
The spring-drunk Chuctanunda
Bleeding, bleeding from the neck,
Its bright dye in that slow gravitas,
The Mohawk’s resurrected dark.


Holiday

“Now we welcome the New Year
Full of things that have never been…”
That’s what Rilke says, the chrysalis
Where we live, everything new
Already old, waking to some new name
Or form, even in the shape it had before.


© Dr Stephen Haven

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