The Keepers

Gold light washed over monochrome
makes the clouds over Moll’s Gap look holy.
And the way the man in the white jumper listens
to the fellow turned to him suggests they’re friends
with each other and with the ground they stand on.

All around them graves dug over centuries,
monks and nuns and the five thousand from the first famine year,
whose remains, hastily buried, sometimes still bloom
in winter’s heavings, so the mowers must take special care.

In this frame of holy clouds and fringe of grass along the bottom,
they could be standing on the further hill
caught in an idle moment at the end of trenching a row
or on the pier, watching the holiday boats.

I imagine they carry the place with them in sleep.
I imagine them not imagining
a single story about the dead whose space they tend,
how they leave that to the tourists replete with maps and phones.

How these men stick to trimming grass and hacking back the fuchsia
when it threatens to engulf some family plot, 
and gather the inadvertent trash left by the curious--
leave rain and sun and wind to do the rest.

Each evening they leave the dead in peace 
and settle in, for Dublin, My Fair City or RTE, or a book 
left open on its spine beside the bed. But they return again each morning, 
speaking a word to this or that inhabitant, as if returning home.

Miriam O'Neal
​
Miriam O'Neal is the author of We Start With What We're Given (Kelsay Press, 2018). Her poems and reviews have appeared in many journals, including Blackbird Review, Lily Poetry Review, Ragazine, River Heron Review, and elsewhere. She is a 2019 Pushcart Prize nominee, was a Finalist in the Brian Turner Poetry Prize in 2016 and the Princemere Poetry Prize in 2018 and also translates Italian poetry. She earned her MFA at Bennington Writing Seminars and lives in Plymouth, MA with her husband and dog.

Francesca Woodman Speaks from MacDowell Colony, 1980

I used to reside indoors, materialize
from the flaking wall, all
the paint of lead, plaster
in pieces, scattered. No fire
in the fireplace. Shard of
smudgy glass.
Now: birches
so thin, so tall.
A stand of them, the one
manifesting me. Not cut
and used for heat
but, rather, to reach
with – my wrists sheathed
in bark. A new kind of
emergence. That one
girl turning into a tree
as form of escape, that
tree with the untoothed leaf
so unlike these and yet moving
in the same direction – toward
clear sky.

**

This poem was inspired by Woodman's photograph, Untitled, MacDowell Colony, 1980. Click here to view it.

**

Francesca Woodman Speaks from New York, 1980

I am trying on being
the wire for the foxglove – that
ladder of petal that recalls
gowns not worn anymore.
Hearty stemmed, this flower
really doesn’t need me. But
sun – morning in the garden
boxed in by walls, of which
I am familiar and a chance
to. What jaundiced threat
and the blurriness of the aura –
that cloudy state I captured
in other years and in other places –
but no matter. For now, now,
and this cup that fits
over my finger outside
of the frame.

Kelly R. Samuels

This poem was inspired by Untitled, New York. Click here and scroll to last photo with foxgloves to view.

Kelly R. Samuels is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. She is the author of Words Some of Us Rarely Use (Unsolicited Press) and Zeena / Zenobia Speaks (Finishing Line Press). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Salt Hill, The Carolina Quarterly, Sweet Tree Review, Menacing Hedge, Heron Tree, and SWWIM. She lives in the upper Midwest. Find her here:www.krsamuels.com

Dear Friends, Readers, Writers,
Don't worry, the challenge is coming- I'm sorry I'm late this time. There were some technical difficulties on my end and I'm fixing them. Hope to post new challenge tomorrow.
​Lorette