On Friday, September 12 at 7 p.m, poet Alison Koffler will be the featured poet at the monthly Writers Night at Cafe Mezzaluna (626 Route 212, Saugerties, NY). Poets and writers are invited to read at the open mic. Dinner will be served from 5 p.m. For directions and reservations, call 845-246-5306.
Alison Koffler was three times the winner of the Bronx Council on the Arts’ BRIO Award for poetry in 1993, 2000 and 2006. She was the recipient of the Poetry Teacher of the Year Award from Poets’ House and McGraw-Hill in 2003 and the Green Heron Poetry Award in 2011. Her poems have appeared in Iris: A Journal for Women, Heliotrope, Home Planet News, lifeblood: the woodstock poetry society anthology and A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley and others. She currently works as an on-site teacher-consultant for the New York City Writing Project at Lehman College.
Late August
There’s consolation in motion,
you can watch the water shiver
when wind strums the lake.
The leaves of the aspens
thrill like countless, mute bells.
Everything is moving,
but never moves
from second to second
in exactly the same way.
If you lie down
in the high, faded grass
it parts to accept your body,
each tall blade waving with the others.
Press your ear to the earth.
Lie still as a sun-warmed stone.
You’ll hear it,
that promise of change,
a deep ground note
beneath all sorrow.
