Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Two November-December 2024
Three Poems by Barbara Crooker.
Starlight Night, Lake George, 1922*
I found that I could say things with color and shapes
that I couldn’t say any other way—things I had no words for.
O’Keeffe
Over my single bed, a print of Van Gogh’s Starry Night Over the Rhone,
while just to the right, the wooden window frames the exact scene O’Keeffe
painted: midnight blue lake, splotchy stars, globes of the dock lights
shining like tiny beacons. It’s both serene and ominous, a reduction
of shape and color, the dark shoulders of the Adirondacks rising behind.
I’m not sure what lesson I’ve come here to learn as I shift from my ordinary
routine, only that stillness permeates this wilderness, punctuated
by the round notes of loons, and every breath restores my equilibrium.
* Georgia O’Keeffe, oil on canvas
Almost August
A steamy day. Deep green. Blue lake.
The susurrus of wind in the leaves as cirrus
clouds drift by. Thrum of tires on the road.
The water, stirred by a motorboat, its ruffled
wake. Deep waters, hidden pike and perch.
Mountains enclose us; beyond their green
boundaries, the busy world hums on.
The then pitch of a cicada rises.
Daylilies
Hemerocallis, “beauty for a day”
Deep in the throat of summer, daylilies open
to the sun, to the humming bees. Some are
fire-engine red with yellow centers; others
are duplicates of goldfinches in flight.
Buttered Popcorn, Stella d’Oro, Mauna Loa,
Firecracker. A riot of color in high summer,
when everything else browns up. Each blossom
only lasts one day, the briefest of beauty.
Velvet claret, vintage pink, sun yellow, fox red.
They tango in the hot wind. Oh, so quietly,
the multiply in the dark.
© Barbara Crooker
Barbara Crooker is the author of ten full-length books of poetry, including Some Glad Morning (Pitt Poetry Series), which was long-listed for the Julie Suk award and Slow Wreckage (Grayson Books, 2024). Radiance, her first book, won the 2005 Word Press First Book Award and was finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize; Line Dance, her second book, won the 2009 Paterson Award for Excellence in Literature; and The Book of Kells won the Best Poetry Book of 2019 Award from Writing by the Sea. Her writing has received a number of awards, including the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships. Her work appears in literary journals and anthologies, including Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and The Bedford Introduction to Literature. She has been a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Moulin à Nef, Auvillar, France, and The Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, Ireland. Garrison Keillor has read her poems on The Writer’s Almanac, and she has read her poetry all over the country, including The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival and the Library of Congress.