Geraldine Connolly was born in Greensburg, Pennsylvania in 1947. Her chapbook, The Red Room was published in 1988 and a full length collection Food for the Winter (Purdue University Press) appeared in 1990. Geraldine Connolly’s second book of poetry, Province of Fire, was published by Iris Press in December of 1998 and Hand of the Wind appeared in June 2009.
She has won many prizes for her work, including two NEA Creative Writing Fellowships, the Carolyn Kizer prize from Poetry Northwest, a Maryland Arts Council Fellowship, the Margaret Bridgman Fellowship to Breadloaf, and the National Ekphrastic Poetry Competition Prize. Her work has appeared in many magazines and journals including Poetry, Chelsea, The Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review and Shenandoah. WPFW’s Writers Almanac broadcast her poem, “The Summer I was Sixteen”.
Blue Bridge
Praise the good-tempered summer
and the red cardinal that jumps
like a hot coal off the track.
Praise the heavy leaves,
heroines of green, frosted
with silver. Praise the litter
of torn paper, mulch and sticks,
the spiny holly,
its scarlet land mines.
Praise the black snake that whips
and shudders its way across my path
and the lane where grandmother
and grandfather walked, arms
around each other’s waists
next to such a river, below
a blue bridge about to be
crossed by a train.
In the last gasp
of August, they erase the time
it might be now, whispering
into the darkness that passed,
blue plumes of smoke and cicada,
eager and doomed.
Mendon
Beets sweetened in the straw basket
and rains poured
from the downturned lake of sky.
Each wet morning her hands kneaded
dough and pulled, sliced the rye loaf
on the pine cutting board,
pinched white geraniums to send
ghost blossoms up the windowpane.
Her reflections spun like a lightning wheel.
Then she rolled rice and meat
into pockets of cabbage, counted them,
smothered them in sauce.
When she sat down to sew,
bad ankle stiffening,
she placed the patch of silk
next to a square of tweed
then plucked one silver button
from the jar of dark ones,
resolved to make something new.
Gleaming thread drifted
like a thought
through the needle’s eye.
She knotted it
and pierced the cloth.
Both poems are from Province of Fire, Iris Press, Oak Ridge, Tennessee. the book may be purchased
at www.irisbooks.com or at www.amazon.com.
