Maureen Clark
Selected Poems
Maureen Clark
Bohemia
lock down has brought back
the subconscious dreamscape
people say that a new Bohemia
is on the horizon
when the pandemic is over
we will see an unconventional world
with more sticky wax and colorful markers
every home will have an upright bass
crackers and cheese cheap wine
oil paints canvas our stories
will come pouring out onto the page
don’t you think
some of you had visitations
in your quiet homes
more religious than church
millions of spirits clogged the airways
going in both directions
enough time to contemplate
what matters
and when dark skies lower
over the roofs remember
the keys are hidden in a shoebox
under the bed dreamscapes
will be filled with makeshift boats
their white sails keeping the belief
of childhood alive
after the pandemonium is over
Maureen Clark
Breaching Moon
When it is time to die, let us not discover
that we have never lived.
—Henry David Thoreau
my self-reliant father will soon become earth
and join the molecules of soil and stardust
which brings Thoreau to mindfor no reason except
Walden is a place my father would have liked
he fought his one acre of hard Utah clay
every year for a yield of tomatoes and corn
my pink roses are fading in a vase while I’m listening to Hauser’s cello
play Benedictus a composition so transcendent
I could almost believe in an afterlife and just as fiercely
believe that my father’s imminent death is meaningless
the book lies open in the middle a dichotomy
of beliefs in a time when I’ve lost everything I believed in
this truth is a sudden sanity coming in
true as the moon breaching the mountains
like a whale from the deep indigo of night
Maureen Clark’s This Insatiable August was released by Signature Books and received Best Poetry Book of 2024 from AML. Her memoir Confessions of a Once Upon a Time Mormon is forthcoming by Hypatia Press. A Country Without You will be coming soon from BCC Press.
