Anyone who consistently tries to write poems – to find the best words and put them in the best order, to tell the kind of hard truths some poems require – eventually winds up writing about poetry too. This week’s short poem uses fog and light – two things Mainers know about – to do just that.

Jeffrey Thomson’s newest collection of poems “The Belfast Notebooks” was published by Salmon Books in 2017. He has been an NEA Fellow and a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar as well as the Hodson Trust John Carter Brown Fellow at Brown University. He is a professor at the University of Maine at Farmington.

Poetry, Part 2

By Jeffrey Thomson

The light

that points

the way

 

in the fog.

The light

in the fog

 

that thickens

and reveals

the fog’s

 

cold breath.

The fog

as well.

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is poet who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2017 Jeffrey Thomson. It appears here by permission of the author. Deep Water: Maine Poems will be accepting submissions during the month of August. For more information, visit mainewriters.org/programs/deep-water.

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