Poetry Reading
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
4 p.m., Willard Smith Library
Vaughan Literature Building
Ellen Doré Watson serves as Director of the Poetry Center at Smith College and poetry editor of The Massachusetts Review. She is the author of four books of poems, including We Live in Bodies, Ladder Music (winner of the New England/New York award from Alice James Books) and, most recently, This Sharpening. Her poems have appeared widely in literary journals, including American Poetry Review, Tin House, and The New Yorker. In 1998, Library Journal named her “One of 24 Poets for the 21st Century.” Among her honors are a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist’s Grant, a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, and an NEA Translation Fellowship. Watson has translated a dozen books from the Brazilian Portuguese, including The Alphabet in the Park: Selected Poems of Adélia Prado, and also co-translates contemporary Arabic language poetry with Saadi Simawe. She makes her home in Conway, Massachusetts.
Ellen Doré Watson
ALSO THE WORLD
There is my loneliness and there is
my daughter’s—different breeds
that speak the same language of I am
ready. Boys will arrive with their hands.
My young beauty will trust them and I her,
and she will fly back, gusty, changed.
There is the way my feet know the stone
a dirt road becomes, detect first sponginess
once veins of ice seep, earth gives up
its grief. In spite of this and every gash
out of the blue, I whisk myself heel-though-toe
stirring the air. The ginger-cat who always
dashed uphill past barking, happy to flop
in roadsand at our feet will be gone,
is gone. What took her is also the world.
