Country roads

Heading home

By MARCIA NEHEMIAH

People who have always lived here call it

a highway, but for me, transplant from a frenetic state,

it’s got all the markings of a country road.

Double yellow line leads me home,

and the pavement traces the river’s curves,

silvery in the day’s dying light.

Crescent moon rises over a mountain

steeped in rustling wildness, and her partner,

Venus in a violet sky, peers down from the ridge line.

Is it her light that fills me with this love?

The Other Side of Somewhere

By KATHLEEN G. GRIMALDI

Country roads are flexible.

Winding their ways

around and about

with narrow lanes

and curves coming

out of nowhere,

they manage to retain

a pliant hold

while passing through

whether soul-searing landscapes

or sparse sordid wastelands.

No matter—

their purpose is true:

to come out lightly

on the other side

of somewhere—

still meandering, still intact.

This week’s Celebrations poets:

Kathleen Grimaldi lives and writes in Lords Valley, PA. In summers, she divides her time between the mountains of Connecticut, where she grew up, and the mountains along the Delaware in Pennsylvania. Her work has ppared in two anthologies and she has been a participating poet in the Robert Frost Festival of Poetry held annually at his farm in New Hampshire.

Marcia Nehemiah, of Lackawaxen, PA, received the 2007 Betty June Silconas Poetry Center Judge’s Award and honorable mention in the 2008 Mulberry Poets and Writers Association Poetry Contest. Two of her poems were cited for Honorable Mention in Perigee’s 2006 Poetry contest. Her book of poems, “Reclamation,” is available at Signature Gifts in Narrowsburg, NY; Main Street Books in Honesdale, PA; and Mill Run Booksellers in Milford, PA. She is a member of the Upper Delaware Writers Collective and writes a column on sustainable living for The River Reporter.