Marsh River Editions

Wisconsin

Poets Laureate

Poems by

Marilyn L. Taylor

Denise Sweet

Ellen Kort

A Project of the

Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission

Marilyn L. Taylor, Ph.D., Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2008 - 2010, is the author of six poetry collections. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including The American Scholar, Poetry, and Smartish Pace. She was the winner of the 2003 Dogwood Prize, and also took first place in recent contests sponsored by Atlanta Review, Passager, The Ledge, and GSU Review. She taught poetry for fifteen years in the Department of English and for the Honors College at UW-Milwaukee. Marilyn is a Contributing Editor for The Writer magazine where her columns on craft appear bimonthly.

Denise Sweet, Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2004 - 2008, is a grandmother and faculty member at UW-Green Bay. Her book Songs for Discharming won the North American Native Authors First Book Award for Poetry. Her other books include: Know By Heart; Days of Obsidian, Days of Grace, with Adrian Louis, Al Hunter, and Jim Northrup; and Nitaawichige: Selected Poetry and Prose by Four Anishinaabe Writers, with Jim Northrup, Marcie R. Rendon, and Linda LeGarde Grover. She has presented over 100 public readings around the United States, in Canada, Mexico, and Guatemala, and has served as poet-in-residence in public and tribal schools.

Ellen Kort served as Wisconsin’s first Poet Laureate from 2000 - 2004. She has authored 14 books and has been featured in a wide variety of anthologies. Her poetry has been performed by the New York City Dance Theater, Perks Dance Music Theater of New York, World Voices Chorale of Minneapolis, and Hospice Poetry Recording Project of Seattle. Ellen has traveled as a poet, speaker, and workshop facilitator throughout the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. She takes her passion for poetry as an expressive and healing art to young students, teachers, physicians, and psychologists, to cancer, grief, and domestic abuse survivors, and to women in prison.

ISBN 978-0-9772768-6-8

Published 2009

29 pages

French flap outer wraps

$10

Summer Sapphics

by Marilyn L. Taylor

Maybe things are better than we imagine

if a rubber inner tube still can send us

drifting down a sinuous, tree-draped river

like the Wisconsin—

far removed from spores of touristococcus.

As we bob half in and half out of water

with our legs like tentacles, dangling limply

under the surface

we are like invertebrate creatures, floating

on a cosmic droplet—a caravan of

giant-sized amoebas, without a clear-cut

sense of direction.

It’s as if we’ve started evolving backwards:

mammal, reptile, polliwog, protozoon—

toward that dark primordial soup we seem so

eager to get to.

Funny, how warm water will whisper secrets

in its native language to every cell—yet

we, the aggregation, have just begun to

fathom the gestures.

Origin of Only

From the origin accounts, 1999

by Denise Sweet

Once there was a young man

whose hands held laughter for him

while he waited for rain

while he walked night into day

A young man whose body

was alive like heat lightning

Whose shoulders gave off sparks

when he walked the train tracks

A young man with stallion hair

whose eyes could follow rain

back into green clouds at dusk

A young man whose Badger disposition

liked the world with nobody in it.

And the grandmothers said

so be that way.

There Will Come a Time

by Ellen Kort

The mystics say when you turn your face

to the world the world will show its face to you

so I sent out a call to the world The first ripple

in the air was a flock of sandhill cranes then egrets

swans blue herons A crusty old crow offered

to bugle our call and clouds of butterflies

shimmered the sky followed us over meadows

and grasslands city streets and sidewalks gravel

roads narrow causeways ice jams gullies

and ditches Such honking there was in the streets

such singing in the air We laid down our voices

like a beacon of light on the dark sheen of rivers

and lakes and the fish rose and joined us

Trees loosened their roots and followed a platoon

of marching penguins hundreds of feral cats

stray dogs a trumpet of elephants We opened

cages and emptied zoos singing John Lennon’s

Imagine all the people and they came

They came chanting chanting like angels Oh

how they came their voices rising And at the helm

the crow still bugling our call all of our bodies

a great warmth One of them might have been you

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