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Fence at Sage Thyme Haven
Who can say where a poet's journey begins?
In West Virginia in childhood when a father recites Poe at the supper table? At church and school where psalms, hymns, and schoolbook verses teach cadence and rhythm? When a girl telling herself stories keeps fear and boredom at bay? When a mother travels twice a month on a bus to the library to gather books for her daughter to devour? In nearby woods where wildflowers, birdsong, mushrooms, and turtles abound? On summer nights on a blanket under the stars when a father teaches the stories the stars tell, what the meanings of infinity and eternity are?
Living now on a great flyway between two wildlife refuges, where great blue heron and wild geese fly over in season daily, surrounded by gardens she has designed, a poet creates a haven in which to celebrate the quiet pleasures of love, friendship, artistic endeavor, spiritual growth, commitment to service and sharing. Born into the aftermath of war, spending her later years still in a world torn by violence and injustice, she seeks to right the balance in the only ways each one of us can: small ordinary daily gestures that foster life.
Patricia Roth Schwartz, poet, fiction writer, gardener, and prison volunteer (facilitating a poetry workshop with inmates), lives in the Finger Lakes Region of central New York state on her 35 acre property, Sage-Thyme Haven. Widely published in literary journals including Nimrod, South Carolina Review, Iron Horse, Clackamas Literary Review, Madison Review, and Palo Alto Review, her most recent work appears in Off the Coast, Ellipsis, Clare, Chaffin, and Sea Stories. She has been the recipient of awards from Clackamas, Rochester's ImageOut, Sow's Ear, and HeartLodge, plus a Lambda Literary award.
MID-JANUARY NOON, THAW, AND
THE RAUCOUS GEESE
stream over the decimated orchard, eaten
in the year of the Great Blizzard,
by deer. I remember their teeth, and those
of the wind that gnawed against
the fragile shelter I'd huddled in. Now
I've made my refuge sturdier; the surviving
trees stretch up their bony-branch arms;
after weeks of no sun, the milky sky seems
ready to let light spill through. Yesterday
a marsh hawk speckled mossy brown over
wide pale wings dove low for prey right
by the bird feeders I'd begun to fill
religiously every day. That swoop left
me trembling: grateful to have beheld
her, the ruthless beauty, amazed
that none of this yet had devoured me.
THE RAUCOUS GEESE
stream over the decimated orchard, eaten
in the year of the Great Blizzard,
by deer. I remember their teeth, and those
of the wind that gnawed against
the fragile shelter I'd huddled in. Now
I've made my refuge sturdier; the surviving
trees stretch up their bony-branch arms;
after weeks of no sun, the milky sky seems
ready to let light spill through. Yesterday
a marsh hawk speckled mossy brown over
wide pale wings dove low for prey right
by the bird feeders I'd begun to fill
religiously every day. That swoop left
me trembling: grateful to have beheld
her, the ruthless beauty, amazed
that none of this yet had devoured me.
(published in Ellipsis)
Her full length volumes of poetry are Hungers (Blue Spruce 1972),
Planting Bulbs in a Time of War (FootHills 2005), and
Down the Middle with a Nickel: a Memoir of a West Virginia Childhood in Poems (FootHills 2007).
She has served as editor for the following volumes of work by inmates: Guerillas In The Mist and Other Poems by Michael Rhynes (Olive Trees Publishing 2009), and Doing Time to Cleanse My Mind: An Anthology From Auburn Correctional Facility's Inmates' Poetry Workshop 2001-2009 co-edited with John Roche (FootHills 2009).
For purchasing information, go to My Books
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