PoetryMagazine.com Editor's Featured Poet Suellen Wedmore

PoetryMagazine.com

Suellen Wedmore
USA

Suellen Wedmore, after twenty-four years working as a speech and language therapist in the public schools, retired to enter the M.F.A. program in poetry at New England College. Now, Poet Laureate emerita for the small seaside town of Rockport, Massachusetts, she has been widely published with work that has appeared in Apalachee Review, The Chaffin Journal, Cimarron Review, College English, Eclipse, Green Mountains Review, Harvard Review, The Ledge, The Louisville Review, The MacGuffin, Manorborn, Oyez Review, Phoebe, Poem, and many others. She was awarded first place in the Writer's Digest rhyming poetry contest and was an international winner in the 2006 Atlanta Review poetry contest. Her chapbook Deployed was selected as winner of the Grayson Press chapbook contest, and she was selected for a writing residency at Devil's Tower, Wyoming. In 2009 she was a winner in the Obama competition sponsored by New Millennium Writings and her chapbook On Marriage and Other Parallel Universes was published by Finishing Line Press. A volunteer on Thacher Island, which houses twin lighthouses one mile from the Massachusetts Coast, she is currently working on poems about historic women lighthouse keepers.

The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife

A bitter snowstorm had set in and there was Maria Bray,

alone on Thacher Island with two babies! 1864

—Edward Rowe Snow: The Lighthouses of New England

My husband stranded on the snow-blind shore,

I tramp through sleet-struck days,

thunder-black, astringent nights,

wave crash, the wind at once a shriek,

a drumming, low-pitched moan,

my son tugging my wind-torn coat,

the baby trundled safe but crying:

six times a day I feed the light’s flames,

climb one hundred fifty steps

to yet another ravenous child—

this one howling for right-whale oil.

and in my mouth the acrid

taste of fear. The sea heaps with foam,

this nor’east gale white-crested

as the one that flung the shipwrecked child

like a gulls egg against granite shore.

What use is food? My world is oil,

match and wick, scouring the sooted

lantern panes. I’ll not sleep until

I hear above the rush of surf

Alexander’s easy Hollo! When I

can measure his leathered face

with my own cracked lips, my wearied

storm-chafed hands.

─Thacher Island is one mile off the coast of Rockport, Massachusetts.

Credit: First appeared in The Louisville Review

Page 2