Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume Seven
November- December 2025
Seven Studies of Light, poems by Sharon Fagan McDermott.
Seven Studies of Light
1
How light asserts itself.
How it argues the dust
and twine of these empty
chairs. How it guides
you where to look,
why to bother.
2
The light in Hopper’s
paintings maps
the miles between
us all, the shut door
a human face could be.
3
Plump sunrise:
a nectarine on a pile of books.
4
My friend Francis says, Let go.
Make room for the new. He etches
a bridge onto a copper plate. I nod,
but I can hardly trust a man with acid
near his fingers. But oh!
what he finally captures in his art
–how light defines itself–
how it twists in branches
of the thin-limbed trees.
How it shreds to sparkle
in the January wind.
5
Blue smoke and a train.
Notes split the wheat
from sun-pools
in late afternoon
haze.
6
Desert scorch
turned O’Keeffe
to her luminous bones.
7
Better to speak a dead language.
Better yet? To still yourself.
Nothing you say will bring them back.
Nothing you say will hold their strange light.
On Growing Old
A train winks between a memory
of leaves. Its engine whistles through
morning yarrow, spider webs glint in sunrise.
I was so alone in that Jersey field,
but peace opened in me like snowdrops.
Sweet planet of air, I am here! Whatever
it means to be passing through. I miss
my home, which is no longer where I left it.
Those August winds carrying rain—so riotous
earlier–now just mizzle and fog.
Now back in this brick city, its contortion of steps
and rivers. This here and now to make a stand,
to understand. To make my bed. To belong
somewhere. To be stood, understood, to know
my place. To place the steaming mug down.
© Sharon Fagan McDermott
Sharon Fagan McDermott is a poet, essayist, and teacher who lives with her dog Beowulf in Pittsburgh, PA. She has published four collections of poetry, most recently Life Without Furniture (Jacar Press, 2018). Her first collection of essays, Millions of Suns: On Writing and Life, co-written with M.C. Benner Dixon was published in 2023 by the University of Michigan Press. “Poets and Writers Magazine” named this collection of essays and writing prompts one of its “Best Books for Writers.”