It seems like I start every installment of this blog with an apology for the long delay. Today is no exception, I’ve been thinking about this one for weeks now. I’m returning to favorite Wisconsin poets for blog number 38.
I met David Southward several years ago when he joined The Hartford Avenue Poets, a critique group that meets on the UWM campus, when we can meet in person. David teaches in the Honors College.
As a poet, David was mentored by former Wisconsin Poet Laureate, Marilyn Taylor. Marilyn is an award-winning formalist, having garnered many contest wins and book awards. David, not surprisingly, is also an accomplished formal poet, specializing in the sonnet. David is quite skilled at writing in many different rhyme schemes, and I always marvel at the way he does it with such apparent ease. Rhyming, in even a fairly simple rhyme scheme requires a real skill in finding just the right word or words to fit in with the poem you are writing. That skill, plus a very good thesaurus!
David’s first chapbook, Apocrypha, is a book of 33 sonnets retelling some of the stories of the New Testament. His second collection, Bachelor’s Buttons, was published by Kelsay Books.
He has won several awards from the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, as well as The Council for Wisconsin Writers. In 2019 David won the Frost Farm Prize for Metrical Poetry. Metrical poetry follows rhythmic patterns, involving varied numbers of syllables but a fixed number of strong stresses in each line. The judges selected David’s poem “Mary’s Visit” as the winner from among 978 entries.
Below you can read Mary’s Visit, as well as his poem “Joseph” a sonnet from his book Apochrypha.
Until next time:
Mary’s Visit
We watched her car pass slowly by our house
and circle back with purpose. It appeared
she’d spotted us, nestled in our dream
of a stone cottage from an earlier time.
She parked out front and asked to come inside.
Naturally we concluded she was lost
or peddling religion. All she had lost
however, was certainty: could this house
have been her Great Aunt Gertrude’s? “Look inside
if you want,” we told her. Something might appear
to bring back vanished memories of the time
she played here with her siblings. “I’ve had dreams,”
she said, “of finding it again”—one dream
in which the porch was sloped like ours. Half lost
in the wistful currents pulling her through time,
I pictured the aunt living in our house—
and how, whenever relatives appeared
on the doorstep, she’d hold the pain inside
her knotted joints, and smile. Here inside
our damp, shade-darkened rooms, her niece would dream
that Gertrude was a witch, that ghosts appeared
behind the bathtub curtain, and that lost
in the woods out back of the spinster’s house
were her missing children. This stored-up time
had become a burden to our guest, a time
that had no place. It rattled around inside,
where doubts began to creep: although our house
looked like the one she’d come to in her dream,
its lines were off; the floor plan did not match
a pattern that had all but disappeared.
“Maybe”—she tapped her head—“it’s all up here.”
One’s memories grew entangled over time
with longing, hope, regret. The thread’s soon lost
that leads out of the maze we live inside—
bumping against the glass doors of our dreams
in search of some distinct, authentic house.
Her fear appeared to change the mood inside
as time resumed its course. Clutching her dream
of what she’d lost, Mary left our house.
Joseph
When the festival was ended and they started to return, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but his parents did not know it. (Luke 2:43)
Three days we searched the city—called his name
through market stalls, down alleys, into wells.
I felt the hot fatigue of fear and blame
in Mary’s tears. But how could I foretell
what he would do—this staid, abstracted boy
who memorized the prophets and withdrew
into himself? A childhood filled with joy
was brushed away like sawdust as he grew.
We found him in the Temple: all aglow
with rabbis’ praise. They laughed that one so young
should ask of our concern, “Did you not know
I must be in my Father’s house?” That stung
like nettles’ fire. Anyone could see
the Father he referred to wasn’t me.