This is Poetry Moment on WPSU – a weekly program featuring the work of contemporary Pennsylvania poets. Your host is poet Marjorie Maddox, a 2023 Monson Arts Fellow, author of more than 20 books, and retired professor of English and creative writing at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University.
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Welcome to Poetry Moment.
“It happens to us all,” begins Ernest Hilbert’s poem “In Bed for a Week.” And ain’t that the truth? In this season where one virus seems to ebb into another, and Covid or the flu swirl dangerously near, it’s easy to feel seasick. Shipwrecked on the island of our bed, we yearn for the calm after the storm.
Ernest Hilbert is the author of the Sixty Sonnets, All of You on the Good Earth, Caligulan—winner of the 2017 Poets’ Prize—Last One Out, and Storm Swimmer, selected by Rowan Ricardo Phillips as the winner of the 2022 Vassar Miller Prize. He lives in Philadelphia, where he works as a rare book dealer.
Thrown off course and navigating illness, we long for that pivot that points us back toward health. In today’s poem, “In Bed for a Week,” Ernest Hilbert employs the sonnet form to underscore a similar change in direction. As the poet steers us toward our final destination, listen for the poetic turn in the final couplet. Finally, the shore is in sight.
Here’s “In Bed for a Week” by Ernest Hilbert
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It happens to us all, at least one time,
The black, caught knot of storm threatens, distant,
But buckling closer, waves capped and blown white.
Heavy tides, laden with fresh wreckage, climb,
Drop down the throat; life is a persistent
Ache of sunken vessels and squandered light.
Barrier islands and breakwaters lost,
The sea flails the darkness, its frayed currents,
Wind-flung sediment, shards like stones thrown,
Pooled mirrors blown to blur down the cold coast,
Leaving foam, crushed scum, marsh sun, a grim sense
Of many inherited contours gone.
But the dark flush in the heart will subside,
Drain slowly, slowly draw back as a tide.
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That was “In Bed for a Week” by Ernest Hilbert. Thanks for listening.
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Listen for Poetry Moment with Marjorie Maddox Mondays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered on WPSU. You can more episodes at wpsu.org/poetrymoment.
Our theme music is by Eric Ian Farmer.
