WHAT WILL YOU DO WITH WHAT I HAVE PLACED IN YOUR HANDS?
WHAT WILL YOU DO WITH WHAT I HAVE PLACED IN YOUR HANDS?
Featured Artist
Betsy Sholl
Betsy Sholl has published six collections of poetry, most recently Late Psalm (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004). Don't Explain won the 1997 Felix Pollak Prize from the University of Wisconsin, and her book The Red Line won the 1991 AWP Prize for Poetry. Her chapbooks include Pick A Card, winner of the Maine Chapbook Competition in 1991, and Betsy Sholl: Greatest Hits, 1974-2004, Pudding House Publications. She was a founding member of Alice James Books and published three collections with them: Changing Faces, Appalachian Winter and Rooms Overhead. Among her awards are a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, and two Maine Writer's Fellowships. Her work has been included in several anthologies, including Letters to America, Contemporary American Poetry on Race, and a range of magazines, including Field, Triquarterly, Brilliant Corners, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, Beloit Poetry Journal. She has been a visiting poet at the University of Pittsburgh and Bucknell University. She lives in Portland, Maine, and teaches at the University of Southern Maine and in the MFA Program of Vermont College.
March 1, 2006, Betsy Sholl was chosen to be the Poet Laureate of Maine, a five-year position named by the governor.
Click on Betsy's photo to go to her site, FMI or to purchase her books
IN-FLIGHT
On Flight 293 from Atlanta,
we passed through castling clouds
and aerial oceans, abstracted from our lives
like the contents of our bags
the airport x-ray exposed
as gray filmy shapes, ghosts of things
we thought we couldn’t do without.
Past the slick ads, the airline magazine
showed men in battered sombreros,
woman wrapped in shawls, who spend
their Lenten months inventing
elaborate designs out of dyed sawdust
to dribble and rake across roadside plots,
repaving the streets for one holy week
into soul paths, swirled with their wildest prayers.
And for what, the reporter writes,
more than once, as if perplexed
and really wanting to know: for what
all that money, that time spent on dust—dust---
over which the Virgin
with her chipped nose and serene gaze will pass,
her makeshift palanquin teetering
on the shoulders of young men
led by trumpeters loudly bearing down
on those fragile tableaux. At dawn it begins,
the commotion sending birds up
out of the trees as if to proclaim
things really could change
in a flash, in sunlight on brass.
Effort and plan, all the grand design
made just for this moment’s noisy arrival—
for the dust’s bright ruin,
and for ruin to be shaken off….
