National Poetry Month : Maxine Chernoff,

 

Diary

 

A new day opens with all griefs known, patient eyes resting on the face that you love.  Trees touch underground, roots interlocking as tendrils curl over the lip of a jar in the sun.  So easy to enumerate our sorrows in the early light of the new year.  Still, we hold onto hope as if it were a key and find the missing door.  When we step inside, a table is set and candles lit.

 

 

 

 

Maxine Chernoff has published 20 poetry books and 6 works of fiction. Her most recent are a collected prose poems (Under the Music) and a selected poems (Light and Clay) from MadHat Press. She has won an NEA in poetry and the PEN Translation Prize, shared with Paul Hoover, for their Hoelderlin translation.  She was department chair at SFSU in CW and editor of NAW and Oink! In 2013 she was a visiting writer at Exeter University in England and in 2016 she was in residence for two weeks at the American Academy in Rome.