Award-winning poet and fiction writer Arthur Powers’s work is informed by his Catholic faith and his concern for the dignity of the common man and woman. His profound short fiction collection, A Hero for the People (Press 53, 2013), drew on his activist work on behalf of subsistence farmers and workers in rural Brazil. I was pleased to blurb his poetry chapbook, Edgewater, just out from Finishing Line Press. This collection of vernacular sonnets takes us into the American heartland past and present, finding the sacramental quality in modest gestures such as a pioneer’s gift of roses for his work-worn wife, or a puddle in an urban snowbank that reminds an immigrant of the idyllic lakes of his lost homeland. Arthur has kindly shared two poems from Edgewater below.

Nauvoo To Bishop Hill

(Summer/1977)

From Nauvoo up to Knoxville, winding
the Mississippi’s green hills hot in
summer, the locusts singing alive
the Illinois sun, we moved slowly,
following curving gray roads that led

through myths of our imagination.
At Knoxville, where the old college stands,
a gray stone soldier guarding
a century, we stopped a moment
in the shade, then on to Galesburg,

the brick heat and sun bright factories,
the railroad switches, the neat white box
of Carl Sandburg’s home, the quick, cheap
restaurant that serves pancakes in his
memory. And so to Bishop Hill.

The green square caught in antique trees
and cubic buildings like children’s blocks
placed neatly around it, strong clean Swedes
working together to carve a dream
out of the midlands of America:

the heat, the locusts, the sharp white sun,
the silence of the dream emptied out
onto the prairie: nothing, nothing
is left, O Illinois, but locusts
singing alive tight summer sun.

****

Sunday Afternoon/Missouri

I met a girl from Hannibal. She said:

“The house where I grew up was built by slaves,
of brick and tall wood, and it seemed the seasons
were woven into the wood. In October,
when we stood in the high ceiling’d rooms
and looked out over the fields, black after
harvest, the leaves on the trees gleamed red.
Then, when the season turned and in the dead
of winter the corn stubs stood like graves
in rows, the wind would blow the leaves away.

The house stood white and naked when it snowed.
They tore it down to build a road.”

We walked along the riverfront. She said:

“Here, in town, there used to be a park
where we’d go to watch the river, slow
and brown, and the stark fields
of Illinois across the river. They
built a grain elevator that blocked
the view.”
Yes, that too, I said.
And a car door slamming shut on a
quiet Sunday.
And Mark Twain dead.