Shana Ritter’s poetry and short stories have appeared in various journals and magazines including Lilith, Fifth Wednesday, and Georgetown Review. Her chapbook Stairs of Separation was published by Finishing Line Press. In the Time of Leaving, a novel of exile and resilience, is set in late 15th-century Spain and was published in 2019. Shana has been awarded the Indiana Individual Artist Grant on multiple occasions.

Welcome to the Poets Weave, I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey. Shana, what poems have you brought for us today?


Poems from the other side (for Toby Strout)

1.
I am trying to translate Neruda when I learn you have died.

I am on the other side of the world, somewhere
in the middle of the long thin country of Chile.

The stars are different here in the southern hemisphere.
I see your absence in the sky.

We head into autumn, while there it turns toward spring.
Our days diminish little by little, there the light lengthens,
breaking into evening like a thief.

You will not be in either season, your afternoons will not grow longer.
Your mornings will not rise out of the dark.
There will be no more bright orange suns.

We are travelling south and south and further south still
A place where sea and shore slip into each other.

The sky gets larger as the curve of the world
takes us toward the eclipse of land.
I do not know
if it is the end of the earth
or the beginning.

2.
In this place sea is air as much as water.

Land disappears into grays and
gray has more shades than any other color.
Loss becomes something different here,
changing mist, thick morning clouds,
the brief clearing in the afternoon.

Here in the place people call world’s end
Passages are revealed as channels
Separating countries, shifting tides, fogging boundaries.

Mist becomes another kind of land
browns and greens swallowed in swaths of sky.

What is the difference finally
between what holds us and what releases
between standing still or lifting up to fly?

 
A sad dusk

it is not the dusk that slopes sadly toward the night
the night is brilliant, full moon, deep blues in the far west
the trees all reaching as if they still believed everything’
would just turn green, as if spring would truly bring
Renewal.

Here the morning is sad, all at once gray trying to tip
towards sunshine trying to reflect in the small dull pond
hoping for a brilliant lightness instead of the suffused
Illumination.

Today I am dull, as in worn down, my edges softened
beyond my own recognition I stay so close to home that
the walls of my house and my skin begin to merge into a kind
of oneness. I find that after all my seeking I had only to
Remain.


Wildflowers

I keep the path along the edge
of the pond mowed short
It leads to the untamed field across

grown rife with daisies, purple clover
queen anne’s lace, and all the flowering
things I know no name for

honeysuckle fills the breeze, opens
into sky, a changing prairie of light
it shifts the colors of everything.

seeking out those that have met
the better side of glory I gather
a fistful of blooms, a field bouquet

to take with. I fill the vase, set it
on the dresser bringing the outside in,
Leaving the tall grass
To waver in a rising wind.


You've been listening to the poetry of Shana Ritter on the Poets Weave, I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey.