Poetry Reading

Maine grows poets like wild blueberries

tender, stubborn, bursting with color.

They rise from rock and salt and loam,

springing up like shy buds after frost,

bearing fruit that is sometimes sweet,

sometimes bitter with truth.

We are the ones who notice:

dew-strung webs trembling in morning light,

the ache behind someone’s silence,

the infinite shades of gray

between a simple black and white.

And though we walk among you

stacking groceries, grading papers,

feeding children, mending nets

we are always dreaming.

We gather seeds:

strange, glowing words,

half-remembered stories,

snatches of song overheard in the dark.

We plant these in notebooks and in silence,

on napkins and glowing screens,

tending gardens of thought

that bloom into visions, ripen into verse.

We climb word-trees,

reaching not just for the sky

but for something deeper:

more earth, more story, more soul.

And sometimes,

in the shifting tides of time,

We are pulled together not by chance,

but by gravity of the spirit,

a secret call heard only

by those attuned to wonder.

We find ourselves drawn

to a place with shelves like spines,

where paper breathes, and voices echo

some call it a Library,

but to we dreamers, poem-carriers,

ink-hearted wanderers

it is a Conjurers' Paradise,

a Coven where we cast

Story and Spell.

There, we speak magic aloud.

We toss lures and lines into the silence.

Something in the air bends,

listens, blooms until we are not alone.

Our words take root in each other,

carry us forward like tides,

reminding us that Maine grows poets

not to keep them hidden in thickets,

but to send them singing

out across the world.