Wednesday Words - Joyce Sutphen

I am delighted to be discovering the poetry of Joyce Sutphen, who is currently Minnesota's Poet Laureate. I'm jealous of students at Gustavus Adolphus College (St. Peter, MN) who get to have her as their English professor.

The poetry I love most somehow connects the everyday with the timeless, the personal with the universal, and the mundane with the wonderful. I like it when a poem comes across as simple and straightforward, and yet stirs up deep and complex feelings and thoughts. I enjoy poems that make me want to be a poet.

It's no surprise, then, that Joyce Sutphen's writing is appealing to me. I'm sure I won't be satisfied until I have all her books of poetry on my shelf. Even then I'll still be unsatisfied because I will wish that there was another.

At the Moment
Suddenly, I stopped thinking about Love,
after so many years of only that,
after thinking that nothing else mattered.

And what was I thinking of when I stopped
thinking about Love? Death, of course—what else
could take Love’s place? What else could hold such force?

I thought about how far away Death once
had seemed, how unexpected that it could
happen to someone I knew quite well,

how impossible that this should be the
normal thing, as natural as frost and
winter. I thought about the way we’d aged,

how skin fell into wrinkles, how eyes grew
dim; then (of course) my love, I thought of you.

“At the Moment” by Joyce Sutphen from Naming the Stars (Holy Cow! Press).
© 2004 by Joyce Sutphen.

Purchase on Amazon:
Naming the Stars (Joyce Sutphen)