This week’s poem, by Sheila Wellehan, follows the movements of a creature’s bone, revealed and carried by spring. I love the speaker’s gentle and curious noticing of the skull, and how it quietly shifts the landscape of her world.

Wellehan’s poetry is featured in On the Seawall, ONE ART, Maine Public Radio’s “Poems From Here,” Rust & Moth, Thimble Literary Magazine, and many other publications, and she is the Frost Meadow Review’s Volume 12 featured poet. Wellehan served as an assistant poetry editor for The Night Heron Barks and an associate editor for Ran Off With the Star Bassoon. Wellehan was born in Lewiston, raised in Portland, and lives and works in Cape Elizabeth. 

Spring Unveils Beginnings and Endings

The skull at Gull Crest was restless.
It traveled from ditch,
to birch limb, to creek,

transforming humble mud
and leafless bramble
to scenes from Georgia O’Keefe.

For weeks, I studied the whitetail deer’s
grinding molars and nipping incisors,
used for grazing here not long ago,

and observed her eye sockets from every angle,
as they stared down at me atop a young pine
or peeked up from under a bridge.

When viburnums bloomed,
I dug a hole for us beneath them—
we both needed our journeys to end.

— Sheila Wellehan

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Spring Unveils Beginnings and Endings,” ©2021 by Sheila Wellehan, was first published in The Night Heron Barks. It appears by permission of the author.