Among Love’s Turnings: Two Poems

by Evelyn Hooven (July 2016)

 

MORNING SONG

 

Waking, crossing

This threshold

While you sleep there,

In plain November hunger

Gloom or candid glare

Something is missing.

 

Last week’s singing

Holds no longer

Neither oblique gold

Nor garlands here,

Oh I have wished all year

For what’s astonishing.

 

 

 

DECLARATION: An Epithalamion

 

And it will stand as a perpetual covenant

Such a one as we always are making

With all worlds whenever we agree

To count up and summarize

Comings and goings, bows and gestures

Till they become as columns

Surmised past all reckoning.

 

We agree

That beneath all endeavor

To build what can be undermined

By error or insufficiency

There will be a no matter what

Forever assumed.

 

We will kneel before altars

Crowned with contracts

And solemnities

Say the sound of laughter

With low reverence

And, rising, behold

The absolute, liberal air.

 

____________________________
Evelyn Hooven graduated from Mount Holyoke College and received her M.A. from Yale University, where she also studied at The Yale School of Drama.  A member of the Dramatists’ Guild, she has had presentations of her verse dramas at several theatrical venues, including The Maxwell Anderson Playwrights Series in Greenwich, CT (after a state-wide competition) and The Poet’s Theatre in Cambridge, MA (result of a national competition). Her poems and translations from the French have appeared in ART TIMES, Chelsea, The Literary Review, THE SHOp: A Magazine of Poetry (in Ireland), The Tribeca Poetry Review, Vallum (in Montreal), and other journals, and her literary criticism in Oxford University’s Essays in Criticism.

 

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