Poetry By Richard Foerster

Judith Jackson CC




Mritasana

There was once peace to be found or rather an absence
more transcendent, like an open field shorn of spring’s chronicle

of timothy and clover, its scent hanging like a covenant,
something a body can sense only while lying there, itself

an open field, or when memory unravels parched-brown
scrolls of hay the tractor made for winter silage—never

the same. A sweet dampness brailled my sun-bared skin
that day, the sky gentled me skyward toward an emptiness

where for a while I hovered like a harrier above the man
I left half-dreaming far below among the stubble of some other

life, its heart-heave and pulsing inescapable itch of green
resurgence, the narrative recalled in the stippled beads

of sweat across my chest, that world again, its catafalque
beneath me, pressing back, falling away.

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Richard Foerster’s ninth collection, With Little Light and Sometimes None at All (Littoral Books), received a Gold Medal at the 2024 Independent Publishers of New England Book Awards. Other honors include the “Discovery”/The Nation Award, Poetry’s Bess Hokin Prize, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and two National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowships, as well as two Maine Literary Awards for Poetry. He lives in Eliot, Maine.