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wieczór autorski Celli Gilbertpublication date: author: CELIA GILBERT
czuły barbarzyńca bookstore May 27, Sunday, 8 PM Celia Gilbert is the author of AN ARK OF SORTS, (Alice James Books) which won the Jane Kenyon Chapbook Award, BONFIRE (Alice James Books), and QUEEN OF DARKNESS (Viking Press, New York). Her work has been frequently anthologized and widely published in, among other places, The New Yorker, Poetry, Threepenny Review, Grand Street, Ploughshares, and Southwest Review. She has recently completed a new manuscript. Gilbert has served as a poetry judge for the prestigious Los Angeles Times Book Awards. She has worked as a journalist and was Poetry and Fiction Editor of The Boston Phoenix, and has taught poetry writing workshops for adults Gilbert was raised in Washington D.C. where her father was the well-known journalist I. F. Stone. It was he who told her when she was a child that to be a poet is the greatest thing in the world. She has a B. A. from Smith College and an M.A. in Creative Writing from Boston University where she studied with Anne Sexton. At Harvard she attended classes with Robert Lowell. She has lived abroad in France and in England and has traveled widely. This is her first trip to Poland and she is very happy to be in a country whose poets are of such renown the world over. Gilbert is also a printmaker and a painter. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is married and has two children and four grandchildren. Woman in the black dress I will never
be on my knees
like this woman in a black dress,
head draped in lace that dapples
her face, in her hands a rosary
charged with the ardor
of her pilgrimage
over the rough, red earth
to the shrine of the Virgin.
Every heart beat, every abrasion,
each labored motion ripens
the fruit of her desire.
Whatever the impulse of grief—
an illness, a loved one’s peril, a sin—
now she is certain she has the full attention
of the Mother, as she offers
all she has, her faith, and her body
linked to the line of others
like herself out in the crushing heat
enduring like Her son
parched, stretched, racked muscles.
The hum of her prayer rising,
slowly, wide eyes blank, she passes
while I envy her.
Wouldn’t I have crawled
on hands and knees,
to my mother’s lap
begging her to hold back
my child’s oncoming death?
Wouldn’t I have wanted to believe as she does—
as the friend does who darts from the crowd
to wipe the sweat from her forehead—
that pain has a purpose, that it isn’t wasted? |
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