How did The Word Works ever manage to spend 35 seasons doing poetry at the Miller Cabin? The answer: we had Jacklyn Potter running the show for 22 years and she loved the out of doors.
Moving the Joaquin Miller Poetry Series to the Planetarium of the Rock Creek Nature is clearly a heavenly graduation, especially on a day such as June 9, 2011 was with its 100 degree Fahrenheit reading, the oppressive humidity and annoying gnats. None of that inside the pleasantly air-conditioned Planetarium where Ranger Scott treated us to the night sky that Joaquin Miller saw over the cabin when it was still in its original location (now Meridian Hill Park).
Our featured readers were: Kelly Cherry and our Jacklyn Potter Young Poets Julia Holemans and Cori Stash. Mel Belin read Joaquin Miller’s poem “Columbus.”
Kelly read from two books, both of which are now being sold in the lobby of Nature Center for entire eight weeks of the Miller Poetry Series.
Here’s a poem from The Retreats of Thought, which is a collection of sonnets that according to Daniel Tobin “dares nothing less than ‘to drag truth from hiding.’”
A BRIEF REVIEW OF WHAT WE HAVE COVERED SO FAR
I think that something and nothing are one
thing, the moon with one side bright as joy,
the other dark, unshined on by the sun
and cold as January in Sheboy-
gan. I think creation and consciousness
are the same one side of a Moebius strip,
unending, so that each is more or less
the other. I think time is round trip,
a journey sweet but often hard and lonely
and taken on the train of thought from here
to here, that all times happen at once, only
past, present, future are how they appear.
I think that when we die we die for good
and ever, making room in the neighborhood.
Kelly Cherry
from The Retreats of Thought
Copyright © 2009 by Kelly Cherry
Join us Thursday June 16 at 7 PM
Rock Creek Nature Center
5200 Glover Road NW DC for
