doublespeakmag

Miriam Sagan’s three poems

Still Casting A Shadow


The old dog 

sleeps in the shade 

beneath the truck bed.


The moon 

sleeps in the shade

of its friend the earth.


I 

sleep in the shade 

of my love for you 


a dark and deep sleep.


I'm Not Shakespeare

 

Sitting in the Miss Worcester diner 

googling “comparison is odious”

I tell you 

“this would make good poem.”

And you say:

“what comes next?”


Do I have to do 

everything myself?

Damascus Gate. Painter Frank Stella. 1969.


I saw this entrance into a holy city when I 

was feckless, young, and underwhelmed 

by life but overwhelmed by myself.


It left me with a taste for large indifferent things 

so much bigger than myself: G-d, 

the ocean, the rings of Saturn 


the look in the face of those

I’ve loved. I’d like to see 

this painting one more time 


now that I’m old.

I could not 

enter it. It entered me.

Miriam Sagan is the author of over thirty books of poetry, fiction, and memoir. She is a two-time winner of the New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards as well as a recipient of the City of Santa Fe Mayor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts and a New Mexico Literary Arts Gratitude Award. She has been a writer in residence in four national parks, Yaddo, MacDowell, Gullkistan in Iceland, Kura Studio in Japan, and a dozen more remote and interesting places. She works with text and sculptural installation as part of the mother/daughter creative team Maternal Mitochondria (with Isabel Winson-Sagan) in venues ranging from RV parks to galleries. She founded and directed the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College until her retirement. Her poetry was set to music for the Santa Fe Women’s Chorus, incised on stoneware for two haiku pathways, and projected as video inside an abandoned building during the pandemic under the auspices of Vital Spaces.

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