Saturday morning readers share:
Maria Rouphail and Joan Barasovska
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This small house, this big sky .
. . Shapes of things: so much the same
. . . . they feel like eternal forms
. . . . . (Adrienne Rich, “Sources”)
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This small house
my heart’s center
where the world entered and sat down
and I greeted it
as a mysterious guest
my first words swelling into
sentences and song
north to the barred owl in the backyard oak
and the clothesline strung with bedsheets post to post
south to the sawmill
and the draft horses pulling flatbeds of logs
east where a gravel road snaked toward the bay
and long clouds steamed from the loud freight train
west and a highway curving into the pines
and the pond where we swam
where a laughing boy in my class
did not drown one afternoon
but caught polio instead
he never walked again
his mother cried
my mother kept me close
and the sky stared at us in silence
every day in those days
I wondered why
that boy
and not me
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Maria Rouphail
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This is the title poem of my 2025 book, This small house, this big sky (Redhawk Press). I deliberately avoided punctuation, hoping to effect a kind of seamless stream of consciousness.
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Papa and me, circa 1952
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Here’s something weird: since childhood I’ve had the ability to “mirror write,” and spontaneously and without pause. Could be because I’m left-handed. Long ago, I was told that DaVinci had the same ability, but I’m certainly no DaVinci!
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Additional poetry by Maria Rouphail at Verse and Image:
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Scarcity
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Love, ever a torment,
a yearning—the knot
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I’ve got for what I need.
Love, not blind, but stupefied
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like grief, like bleeding.
The trouble with me
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is agony, the piercing note
of longing, its persistence.
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It’s plainly the shame
of scarcity, the freeze
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of what I sprang from.
I guess I cried.
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Joan Barasovska
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Scarcity is forthcoming in the winter edition of Persimmon Tree.
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I am sitting at my small desk, above which I have placed many, many things: a photo of the sign that hangs outside of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the cracking cover of an old Penguin paperback of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan with Joan in armor on her steed looking skyward; a clipping of a newspaper headline: “The Courage to Be Alone”; my dad’s business card; a Bazooka Joe comic in Hebrew; the poem “Crossing” by Jericho Brown; lines from Eudora Welty, Borges, Eliot, Mark Strand, Raymond Carver; Bertolt Brecht; a note from Bill Griffin: “You are the beating heart of NCPS, not to mention spleen and gizzard”; a framed arrangement of dried flowers and ginkgo leaves. More. But there’s a yellowed, brittle piece of newsprint, probably from The American Poetry Review, with these lines: “There the wind blows / There the rain falls / There god roams / on his palms, on his all four palms” Can anyone identify this? Is it familiar? I would love to know.
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Also on my desk, this photo with my daughter Clare in my living room
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Additional poetry by Joan Barasovska at Verse and Image:
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Saturday Morning Submissions – Once a week on Saturday I feature one or two poems shared with me by readers. If you would like to consider having a favorite poem appear, either by you or by a poet you admire, please see the GUIDELINES here:
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V E R S E and I M A G E 
Maria has just let me know that this small house, this big sky has been short-listed for the 2025 Roanoke-Chowan prize. Congratulations, Maria!
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Thank you, friend Bill, for inviting me to a duet with my cherished Poet Sister!
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