Work by Local Poets Paula Erickson and Lucile Burt

Poets Paula Erickson and Lucile Burt are very good at making the ordinary extraordinary. They enchant us with mud, a tailpipe, a speck of seed. How? By rendering them beautifully but also by proclaiming them sacred, joined to what we love, cornerstones in the architecture of our lives. Poems like the ones on these pages—ringing with elements of prayer, and blessing, and faith—are a form of worship, elevating the elemental to the sublime, and making us grateful to be where we are.

— LAUREN WOLK

PAULA ERICKSON is a performance artist, naturalist, activist, and poet. She founded the Fleet Fund to address urgent financial needs for residents of Wellfleet, where she has lived for some two decades and change. When she’s not gathering mulch or composing flower bouquets, she might be found paddling, or clamming, or collaborating to form the Lily House, a social model community home for living and dying.

LUCILE BURT is a retired high school English and creative writing teacher currently living in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared in various small press journals and in the anthology Teaching with Fire. Her chapbook Neither Created Nor Destroyed won the 2012 Philbrick Poetry Prize from the Providence Athenaeum. Her latest book, The Cone of Uncertainty, was published in 2018 by Kelsey Books. The rural landscape of her childhood in upstate New York and the narrow arc of outer Cape Cod are the landscapes of her inspiration. The work of writing poetry, with its careful attention to sound and rhythm, is a kind of meditation that helps her see connections that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Hamblen Farm Morning, Wellfleet

by Paula Erickson

Overalls over thermals all tucked into rubber boots coffeed and fed enough to go on buckets, rake and Elke in the truck, we hiccup the dirt road to the farm.

A February thaw gives rise to whiffs of feverfew and the old cedar, its fruit scattered juniper blue against pale grass, the mudded earth forgiving and soft underfoot.

Mind easing, I set to work casting aged manure, darning dark furrows, tucking garlic under a mantle of cord grass winnowed by the sea.

My dog finishes her survey of invisible wild things, sees I am too dull to play, settles with a sigh atop her new mulch bed.

When hunger calls for a second breakfast I gather tools and load up.

Something—a stick perhaps, rings the tailpipe like a bell as if to consecrate the morning.

Think of the air then. Think of atoms from a burned beeswax candle lifted by heat into air, atoms that were once nectar, and before that, bud, stalk, root, seed, all that grew from life decomposed, whisked off on wind.

I buried only half of my parents’ co-mingled ashes. The rest I saved for the garden. I left them unburied for years, inert in their urn. They nagged, not for burial, but the untended garden.

Their atomized hearts and lungs were already gone on the currents, rained on the ocean perhaps, or a London street or a field in China, turned to hurricane, run-off, rice.

Finally, November, I pull up overgrown grass and weed. I turn over earth and memory. Here grew food for the summer table. Over the raw earth, I scatter their ashes, dig them down to root depth where they wait all winter.

In June, no practical plants rise from their bones. Instead, the last of them blooms into poppy, snapdragon, daisy, into coreopsis, columbine, cosmos, the riotous chorus of matter.

Neither Created Nor Destroyed

by Lucile Burt

Drift

by Lucile Burt

Dried pods of butterfly weed split open, spilling bursts of silky filaments, each ferrying a speck of seed.

Briefly the air fills with floating bits of fluff, fragile, lovely as hope adrift on wind’s whim.

Few will fall on fertile ground, rest in winter-cold earth, burst forth in spring in some unexpected place.

From one small brown seed packed tight with bright gifts for monarchs and honey bees, the orange surprise of survival.

Deceived by water at their roots and thin light of winter sun, bulbs send out shoots into this wrong season.

They do not know betrayal, do not retreat, do not refuse to open perfumed blooms, in brief display that dazzles,

a simple yielding to water, light, quickening at the core, the impulse to bloom into whatever is offered.

Forcing Narcissus In January

by Lucile Burt