Poetry Moment on WPSU is a program featuring the work of contemporary Pennsylvania poets. Host Todd Davis is a professor of English and Environmental Studies at Penn State Altoona.
This episode’s poem is “Dear Friend Since Childhood” by Hayden Saunier.
Hayden Saunier is the author of five poetry collections, most recently A Cartography of Home and How to Wear This Body. Her work has been awarded the Pablo Neruda Prize, the Rattle Poetry Prize, the Gell Poetry Award, and the Keystone Award. An actor as well as a writer, Hayden is founder and director of No River Twice, an improvised, interactive, audience-driven poetry reading. She grew up in piedmont Virginia and now lives between a sugar maple and a sycamore above a creek in eastern Pennsylvania.
Friendship occurs in many forms over a lifetime, and some of us have friends who remember us from our earliest years of childhood. In today’s poem, the poet sets a scene to take her back to a place where a friendship was shared in a small creek, resurrecting youthful mothers who watch over these two childhood friends as they play in the water, building an earthen dam, that when burst, allows the water’s currents to carry them downstream into another life that awaits them.
Here's —
Dear Friend Since Childhood
Let’s set the scene
one hour before sunset
memory’s golden hour
light shot across the field
bright haze of pollen
gleaming insects, swallows
dropping in and out of sky
above the pasture’s
twenty-seven different shades
of iridescent green
we counted once—
we counted everything—
let’s spread those blankets out
across tall grasses
where our mothers sit
barelegged, straight-backed,
impossibly young,
peeling waxy opaque paper
from chicken salad sandwiches,
or shelling hard-boiled eggs
with oval fingernails,
their beautiful hands,
so fluid and cool— offering
each other coffee from
a Scotch plaid thermos.
Quick, dam up the creek bed,
make a shallow pool
the way we used to do
and lie back in the water
kick hard against the dam
of earth and stone
one kick was all it ever took—
and then let’s try to love
the way the current tries
to carry us away.
————
That was “Dear Friend Since Childhood” by Hayden Saunier.
This is host Todd Davis' final episode as host of Poetry Moment. He hopes the poems over this past year have carried you into new worlds.
Thank you for having shared so many moments of poetry with Poetry Moment this year.
Hear more episodes of Poetry Moment at WPSU.org/poetrymoment.
Music by Eric Ian Farmer.
