This week’s poem has a French title that means “the lost land.” We don’t know who is talking here, only that it’s someone who has lost a country and is remembering it in an unadorned way – note the lack of punctuation and capital letters.
The poem doesn’t need to tell us how much it hurts to lose a homeland. This heavy loss is implicit in the sharpness of the way the speaker remembers how a sunset looked amid the giant, old trees.
Dawn Potter lives in Portland and directs the Conference on Poetry and Teaching at the Frost Place. She’s the author of seven books, including her most recent book of poems, “Same Old Story.”
la terre perdue
By Dawn Potter
back in my country
we hardly knew what a sunset was
the trees were so dense
weighted with lichen and time
at evening the shadows
of the pines the firs the tamaracks
would crowd the heavens
and on a summer night the sky
would sink into a blue so black
it was the wet ink of fountain pens
it was old work shirts forgotten in the rain
and now a lemony streak of light
would finger each giant’s shadow
and the day birds would cry out
their last words their last words
and now silence and now
the owl would begin to speak
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is Portland’s poet laureate. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2017 Dawn Potter. It appears here by permission of the author. For an archive of all the poems that have appeared in this column, go to pressherald.com/tag/deep-water.
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