The chilly nights have arrived, and so the pleasure of a fire – and this week’s poem praises the stacking of the wood that feeds it. Doug Woody Woodsum’s “Wood Stacking Song” rings with the music of the body in motion as it lifts and stacks. I love this singing, and the tiny, clarion autumnal pains that the stacking both raises and eases.
Doug Woody Woodsum writes and publishes a few poems a year, and writes newspaper columns on education and conservation. He teaching at Carrabec High in North Anson.
Poets, please note that submissions to Deep Water are open through the end of the year. Deep Water is especially eager to share poems by Black writers, writers of color, Indigenous writers, and other underrepresented voices. You’ll find a link to submit in the credits below.
Wood Stacking Song
By Doug Woody Woodsum
Sing, back, sing: that sweet warm note, that small pain
like a blue jay’s cry. Sing, quadriceps, sing
like a wad of violin strings: cordage
or cables between hip and knee. Sing, bones
and joints, with a percussive pop and a click
in the neck like a castanet. Oh what
a chorus we are, sing the bones to the flesh,
Oh what a chorus we are. That is no
horsehair bow on a catgut string; that
is a splinter going in: sing oh sing!
As the vertebrae hum lift with the legs
and the biceps bulge like small kettle drums
the heart beats staccato and makes the ears ring
so the brain feels no pain. Lift and stack it sings.
Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Wood Stacking Song,” copyright © 2017 by Woody Woodsum, was published in Maine Writes Journal (Maine Writing Project, 2017). It appears by permission of the author. Submissions to Deep Water are open now and through the end of the year. For more information, go to www.mainewriters.org/deep-water.
"wood" - Google News
October 03, 2021 at 03:00PM
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Deep Water: 'Wood Stacking Song,' by Doug Woody Woodsum - pressherald.com
"wood" - Google News
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