"Going in a hundred directions but in the end realizing it's always been a straight line...." Daughter, granddaughter, sister, wife, mother, grandmother, Nancy Burt Hodermarsky brings "a maturity of voice and emotional experience [to her work],... depth that is moving and real." She wrote before she knew how to write words, filling lined notebooks with a lively simulated cursive. As a young adult she found herself venturing forth at home, then school, then abroad, developing skills of language, becoming self-supporting. Hodermarsky (Vassar College, B.A.; Case-Western Reserve University, M.A.; Western New England School of Law, J.D.) had a forty-year career, primarily as a teacher, in Cleveland, Rome, Athens, New York City and Greenfield, MA. She became a Massachusetts attorney in 1981, practiced in Greenfield, then retired with her husband, artist Daniel Hodermarsky, to their home on Deer Isle in 1989. At the age of 81 she sees her life has always been one of intention, a life centered in family, in the familial careers of teaching and family law and, always, in the love of writing. In these last fifteen years Hodermarsky has chosen to return to poetry as a way to give voice to that life.
So Long, See You Tomorrow
In the corner lot of childhood
home base is the lid of a trash can,
1st, 2nd, 3rd, broken rocks.
Summer suns trick the eyes;
home runs break some windows;
and the stranger who stops to watch
must be a big league scout.
But he's just a photographer
down on his luck, taking shots
of kids, peddling them to parents,
making a buck like the babushkas
up from the projects with baskets
digging dandelions for dinner
out of the greenyards.
In those pick-up games everyone plays:
the best fielder at left or at short stop;
at right, the kid with his hands in his pockets;
the troubles of home -- beatings, drunks
depression, guns, serial trips to crazy farms --
forgotten.
When the bat hits the ball, the runner runs...
until the street lights turn on,
and the summons home comes.
Then the children call to each other,
"So long, see you tomorrow,"
plunging out from the field
through bindweed and thistle
like blind grasshoppers jumping.
Previously published: U.S. 1 Worksheets: Volume 51
Wild Things
Near dawn
on a black country road
headlights jack woods and ice.
She tries, as she always does,
to take herself off that road,
to turn herself into brush;
but she is fixed in their sights.
She sees their orange vests,
their licensed eyes,
guns pointed;
she puts herself to the edge.
There, in the dark of the moon
where three roads meet,
she stands,
horned hind at her side.
The truck slides by
just as the sun is rising.
Previously published: U.S. 1 Worksheets: Volume 46/47
Of Luminescence
We fare on sea shells
moonlit,
ankle deep in luminescence,
floating, lambent, disembodied,
a waking of plankton
at ocean's edge,
and drift through fields
knee deep in noontide,
in purple vetch, buttercup,
bluet, violet, forget-me-not
of beyond calling back delight;
so like stones full of longing
ever pushing up from beneath,
we breathe
in each other, taste salt,
touch, all over,
without hands.
Previously published: Eggemoggin Reach Review