By Way of Elegy
Two Poems
By Evelyn Hooven (August 2017)
Angel of Death Victorious, Herman Martzen, 1923 (Lakeview Cemetery, Cleveland, Oh)
A DAUGHTER’S SONG
When you brought me to the world
When you fondled me
When the milk knit my bones
When the hope began to grow
Why didn’t you tell me
Why didn’t you tell
Why didn’t you tell me
How much time I had?
Now I’m left in the middle,
Stopped, in the lurch,
About to take steps
Go where the map says
Ethiopia, Colombo,
Newfoundland,
Andaluz, San Salvador—
Left in mid-air . . .
When you brought me to the world
When the first tooth grew
When the sugar was honey
And the milk was you
Why didn’t you tell me
Tell me, tell—
Why didn’t you tell me
How much time I had?
As it is I’ve been a wastrel . . .
CHANT FOR A LOVER
I cradled him in moss one day,
A chill, a moment! He was gone,
A phantom took my love away,
A ghost has cast him into stone.
Fireflies dance their light away,
Dead bones stir in lands unknown,
A phantom bore my love away,
A ghost has wrought him into stone.
____________________________
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.
To help New English Review continue to publish moving and thought-provoking poems, please click here.
If you enjoyed this poem by Evelyn Hooven and want to read more of her work, please click here.