D'Alzon Library Events
A Poetry Reading by Meg Kearney
Friday, November 18 at 7pm
Meg Kearney's second book of poems for adults, Home By Now (Four Way Books, 2009), was the winner of the 2010 PEN New England L.L. Winship Award as well as a finalist for the Foreword Magazine Book of the Year and the Paterson Poetry Prize. She is also author of An Unkindness of Ravens (BOA Editions, 2001) and a novel-in-verse for teens, The Secret of Me (Persea Books, 2005); its sequel, The Girl in the Mirror, is forthcoming in 2012. Meg's first picture book, Trouper the Three-Legged Dog, is forthcoming from Scholastic in 2012 with illustrator E.B. Lewis. Her poems have been featured on A Writer's Almanac, and have appeared in myriad anthologies. Former Associate Director of the National Book Foundation—sponsor of the National Book Awards—she has also taught poetry at the New School University in Manhattan. She is now Director of the Solstice Low-Residency MFA in Creative Program of Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, MA. (www.megkearney.com)
Elegy for the Unknown Father
Maybe there's a reason I was left
without a map to find you, why
the trail to your door has long gone
arctic. I've sat here nearly an hour
on the bench that marks the grave
of the man who raised me. I know
the way to this place, the back roads
south of the highway, the pothole
just before the iron gate. I know
its sparrows and withering lilies as well
as I knew the face of this father
walking in the door with an armful
of firewood or a fist of flowers. See
the groundskeeper give me a wave?
He knows me by name.
I have never needed you less.
Meg Kearney, from Home By Now
