The Princeton area-based Cool Women poetry group will read new works and selections from “Cool Women Volume 7” at the Lawrenceville Branch of the Mercer County Library on Thursday, November 30, at 6:30 p.m.
The 10-member critique and performance group comprises noted regionally based and often published poets who have been meeting and presenting for almost 30 years.
They include Gretna Wilkinson, Sharon Olson, Maxine Susman, Judy Rowe Michaels, Juditha Dowd, Lois Marie Harrod, Joyce Greenberg Lott, Eloise Bruce, Betty Lies, Penelope Scambly Schott, and Carolyn Foote Edelmann.
The November-themed poetic jazz performance, titled “Fall Forward, Smile Back,” will be followed by a reception with refreshments. Admission is free.
Here are samples from three of the poets:
Nightlight
As if your lips had brushed me I awoke,
saw that this was not our room,
my mind a rambler, too full of gloom
to share your sleep. The moon was partly cloaked
by cloud, but I sensed in its chilly face
a life unfolding elsewhere, yet close to me,
as when a siren makes me look up from my tea.
Why would that indifferent gleam be solace?
But I lifted toward it in just the way
I caught a breath, learning someone I’d treasured
once is dead a year. Bitterness gone stick
as mints left in a pocket. The beam crept down, lay
itself across my feet. I could almost misread
it as the cat, a silvered whisker glinting.
— Juditha Dowd
Community Garden, Lawrenceville, NJ
The voices of cicadas sizzle.
The weight of the well’s water
creaks in the Muslim woman’s red wagon wheels.
A bee buzzes within a closed squash blossom.
The Chinese couple hoe the earth softly
As with a calligrapher’s brush. The garden
is filled with the small sounds of so many breathing.
The man from Trinidad chirps to the tall African
wondering what stinks to high heaven.
My manure is making a lot of noise.
If a place in time is a destination,
I have arrived in a chorus of tongues,
wing beats, and the breeze through the stalks of corn.
Here even the dirt speaks, the sun
beats down on us, pulsing like our blood.
I have grown gourds to rattle.
— Eloise Bruce
Ascophyllum nodosum, Knotted Kelp
Acadia National Park, Maine
At low tide we lie
tangled,
a jangled heap
thrown on stone
but when the tide
glides in,
our bead-like
bladders,
those little knots
of air,
lilt us up
like ballerinas—
and we drown.
Twice daily—
dried
and drenched.
Why do we
worry so?
Even as we die,
we dance.
— Lois Marie Harrod
Fall Forward, Smile Back, readings from “Cool Women Volume 7,” Mercer County Public Library, Lawrence Headquarters Branch, 2751 Brunswick Pike, Lawrence Township (at Darrah Lane), Thursday, November 30, 6:30 p.m. Free. Registration requested by calling 609-883-8292, e-mail ing lawprogs@mcl.org, or visiting www.mcl.org.
For more information on Cool Women Poets, visit coolwomenpoets.org.
