William Greenway

Shoveling the Shadow

William Greenway

The little girl walking along the edges of the pool is trying, with her blue plastic shovel, to scoop up the shadow walking beside her. She is unhappy with it, and seems to be wanting to change it, rearrange it in some way into something that is not quite her, but something better.

Her mother is nowhere, so I can’t compare what she will be, and wonder if she will ever be happy with what she has finally made, even if she thinks she will learn somehow what that is by looking down deep into her dark pail.

William Greenway’s 13th collection, As Long As We’re Here, is from FutureCycle Press. He has won the Helen and Laura Krout Memorial Poetry Award, the Larry Levis Editors’ Prize from Missouri Review, the Open Voice Poetry Award from The Writer's Voice, the State Street Press Chapbook Competition, an Ohio Arts Council Grant, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and was Georgia Author of the Year. Publications include Poetry, American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Missouri Review, Georgia Review, Southern Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, and Shenandoah. Greenway is Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Youngstown State University, and now lives in Ephrata, Pennsylvania.