This week’s poem, Ellen Goldsmith’s “Navigating New Waters,” offers a wonderfully subtle meditation on precarity, flux and the different “homes” we inhabit – a house, a body, a windy coast. I love how much feeling this poem conveys through its seemingly simple lyric observations, and the breathtaking leap in the voice of the final line.
Goldsmith reads, writes and teaches poetry. “Left Foot, Right Foot,” her most recent book, is an illness and recovery story in 28 poems, and her first book, “No Pine Tree in This Forest Is Perfect,” won the 1997 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition. Her poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologies. Professor emeritus of the City University of New York, she lives in Cushing.
Poets, please note that submissions to Deep Water are open through the end of the year. Deep Water is especially eager to share poems by Black writers, writers of color, Indigenous writers, LGBTQ+ writers, and other underrepresented voices. You’ll find a link to submit in the credits below.
Navigating New Waters
By Ellen Goldsmith
The roofers are banging
and machines whirr.
Most windows are covered and all doors
blocked.
Where I can see out—
ladders, blue drop cloths, ropes, old shingles
strewn
across the lawn.
No leaks yet
but shingles, worn and misshapen.
In my other house
severe stenosis of my aortic valve.
2.
So windy today.
I hold tight to the paper as I write
so it doesn’t blow away.
A small boy wheels his bicycle
to the bluff at the edge of the water.
Wait, I call.
Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Navigating New Waters,’” copyright 2023 by Ellen Goldsmith, appears by permission of the author. Submissions to Deep Water are open now and through the end of the year. For more information, go to mainewriters.org/deep-water.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
