Poetry by Sara Shea

Sara Shea received her BA from Kenyon College, where she served as Student Associate Editor for The Kenyon Review. She's pursued graduate studies through the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNC Asheville and at Western Carolina University, where she studied with Ron Rash. Her work has appeared in The Connecticut River Review, Quarterly West, The Static in Our Stars Anthology, Key West Love Poetry Anthology, Amsterdam Quarterly, Gaslamp Pulp, Petigru Review, New Plains Review, The Awakenings Review and Atlanta Review. Shea is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the New Millennium Poetry Prize judged by UK Poet Laureate Andrew Motion.  Shea writes professionally, producing marketing materials for a fine arts gallery in Asheville, North Carolina.

Elegy for the American Chestnut

Beams in my Connecticut home

               were massive; 12” x 12”, 32-foot,

               rough-hewn with broad axe, adze—

               muscle and grit carved into the grain.

The electrician, awestruck,

                  unable to drill through, ran his hands

                   over dark wood solid as stone;

                 whispered, Priceless. American chestnut.

                  Years later, living in Appalachia,

                  I found sepia photos—

                  lumberjacks dwarfed by hundred-foot trunks,

                   ten men ringing the girth of a giant,

                   hand to hand,

                   as if worshiping a god.

                   Lord of the Forest.

                   Redwood of the East.

Those bygone forests!

                     Leaves that shimmered like steel blades,

                     long and serrated,

                      a rippling susurration like rain

                     moving in slow waves across a valley—

                     an oceanic voice rolling down from ridgelines.

Bees swooned

                     on summer air swollen with the loamy musk

                     of honeyed plumes.

Pungent—

                     feral,

                                   carnal,

                                                  fertile—

Slender white catkins swayed

                    like strands of coral caught in a slow tide,

                    draping branches like seafoam, like soft filaments of light,

                    bursting from the tips of every twig,

                    a scent so intimate and unmistakable—

                                       a whisper of life itself.

Memory drifts

                       from autumn leaves bronzed and curled,

                        carpeting the forest floor,

                       soft underfoot, muffling the steps

                        of black bears and foraging deer.

                        Appalachian hands gather the weight

                        of absence,

                         where once they plucked

                         barrels full of sweet, starchy nuts,

                          clad in their spiny armor.

No sweeter sport

                           than foraging chestnuts

                           on a crisp morning,

                           when frost-split burs spill

                           their hidden gold,

                            scattering smooth, burnished fruit

                             among the rust and ruin of fallen leaves.

                             Roasted, slow-split by flame,

                             or folded into Cherokee breads—

                             once, its sweetness lingered,

                            savored,

                             rich as autumn itself.

                                               Now, only a ghost on the tongue.

Along the Blue Ridge Parkway,

                            wormy fences endure—

                             blight-felled trees,

                              hewn into

                                             splinters

                                                          of memory.

Worm Blood Moon Eclipse

I. Full Moon

A full lunar eclipse arrives
the same day as my blood.
March sun bakes Carolina clay,
red as ochre ground to powder—
It's the color of survival.
Oxidized copper,
pigment of the oldest petroglyphs—
handprints on cave walls.

Earthworms stir deep beneath,
digesting dirt, loosening ground for seed.
Corn, okra, collards
will soon sprout from southern fields
the color of Mars,
red as the shadowed moon.

II. Last Quarter Moon

On the farm, I learned to candle eggs,
holding them to light in a dark room—
a fertile egg will show a shadow,
an embryo, a pulse,
something moving inside.

Nearsighted, seeking distance
a doctor’s ophthalmoscope
revealed the same mystery:
the ghost of my own body inside itself—
optic nerve, vessels, retina—
the web of me, illuminated.

III. New Moon

As a child, I saved earthworms from puddles,
warmed their soft, segmented bodies in my palm,
placed them back in the dark, in the loam.

Now, nearing menopause
my blood is slow, ruddy, rusting,
a thick tide retreating.
Cells dry out, desiccate—
brown-red like the eclipsed moon.

Pale pink earthworms rise,
gulp clay, move it through themselves,
softening the planet for planting.
Their thick-banded clitellum swell
to the hue of the blood moon, storing eggs,
Millions of new bodies forming in the dark.

IV. First Quarter Moon

The worm moon smolders red at the edges,
like the sun that year of the forest fire,
when smoke swallowed the light.

Longer wavelengths bend, diffused
through thinning air—
Rayleigh scattering.

The sun’s unblinking eye blazes
as earthworms thin topsoil, as
the shadow of our planet passes over us.