This week’s poem, Kate Kearns’s “Whitehead Cliff,” invites us into wild reverence for the elements, for their vast strength, history and clamor. I love this poem’s vividly tangible descriptions, the dizzy leaps of its line breaks, and the speaker’s potent lines – a command to herself to fully inhabit all of it.
Kearns earned her MFA from Lesley University. Since then, she’s published a chapbook entitled “How to Love an Introvert” (Finishing Line Press, 2015), and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Literary Mama, Soliloquies Anthology, The Perpetual You magazine, as well as other online journals. She lives in Scarborough.
Whitehead Cliff
By Kate Kearns
Back turned to Monhegan, far from your country
as you can sit, waves beat the igneous shore to shards.
Magma poured this land into light, and light
drew it into pitch-sweet shelter. Far as far, all the way
to the brightward rim, sharp, fresh salt rushes,
wrecks, retreats. This body is larger than anything
living, all voice, its din absolute. A racket so smashing
even the hardy gulls fly low. Stone shingled into
a thousand small ravines persists the iron wind.
Without soil, beach roses feast the edges, find nooks
in which to root. You scraped for months to get here,
sure, but here you are. The hardwoods, their arms,
went to timber in your name. Woman, don’t you
look away. Face into the holler and be brave.
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. “Whitehead Cliff,” copyright © 2021 by Kate Kearns, was originally published in Northern New England Review. It appears by permission of the author.
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