POETRY

This Time

By Marc Harshman     VOLUME 58 No. 1

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A car up-risen from the road
          comes to rest beside our Holsteins,
          a caryatid for the sky
          draped in mud and algae.
Not the rapture, but the flood this time
          came in the night and reached
          this far inland and now retreats,
          leaving the pasture
          greener than before.
You’d worried the storm betokened
          the inevitable consequences of our headlines,
          that rapture, or rupture, some fatal estrangement
          was surely upon us, some dark ecstasy or madness,
          some fracture or terminal sundering of everything
          would lift the sheets and then lift us
          out into a timeless, breathless erasure.
But look, here we are, only a car stranded
          in the fecund Purgatory of our back field,
          and we have our peaceful herbivores to remind us
          breakfast awaits and the clock is ticking forward
          as it did yesterday as oblivious
          as we are of the next close encounter
          with our everyday mortality.

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MARC HARSHMAN’s collections of poetry include Woman in Red Anorak (Lynx House Press), winner of the Blue Lynx Prize, and Believe What You Can (West Virginia University Press), winner of the Weatherford Award and named Appalachian Book of the Year by the Tennessee Mountain Heritage Literary Festival. Harshman’s latest poetry collection is Following the Silence (Press 53). He is co-winner of the 2019 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award for his poem “Poet in the Schools,” and his poem “Dispatch from the Mountain State” was printed in the Thanksgiving 2020 edition of the New York Times. His fourteenth children’s book, Fallingwater: The Building of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Masterpiece (Roaring Brook Press / Macmillan), co-authored with Anna Egan Smucker, was named an Amazon Book of the Month. He received the Appalachian Heritage Writer Award for 2024 from Shepherd University and has been poet laureate of West Virginia since 2012. His next poetry collection is forthcoming from West Virginia University Press in 2025.


VOLUME 58 No. 1