In the wake of Michael Hoover’s convalescing, area poets will be posting articles to further the conversation of poetry. Each edition will begin with a brief biography of the contributor.
This week, former and first Hanover Poet Laureate, Anna Manahan Bowman presents her views.
She founded the Hanover Poets and has maintained a critique group at The Reader’s Café, 125 Broadway, every third Monday evening starting at 7:30 for the past decade. She co-edited Digges’ Choice literary magazine.
Having read and been published widely in addition to winning numerous writing contests, Anna continues to promote poetry in our community. She is also a watercolorist and specializes in hand-crafted books. Bowman lives in the Hanover area with her husband Larry.
In our travels around the globe with all its existential glory, I suspect we will not find a more stirring sight than our own Lake Marburg in autumn – its fevered pitch, flaring wardrobe, the daring of it all.
For a couple whose idea of a perfect Sunday afternoon was to walk the trail up to High Rock and back with a bottle of soda and a bag of chips, to now live five minutes from Lake Marburg dwarfs all earlier treats. The lake has become our everyday place, a place of solitude, a place of community, a place to connect with the past and launch the future.
So, to attend an October wedding in the band shell last Saturday was to spend a stunning afternoon at water’s edge in a doorless sanctuaryunder the bluest of ceilings and beside the brightest candles.
All weather-worry risks posed by planning an outdoor wedding were non-existent as sun streamed down on the brilliant pair vowing their everlasting commitment. Sitting in those surroundings and hearing the jubilant declarations, I was struck by the thought of how both a lake and a marriage are subjected to whims of the seasons.
The lake not only endures, but tacks each cycle up on full display. When days fold into straight white lines, we can bundle up and take time out to capture some blue-ribbon stills, deer tracks, and a chance to hear the pines when wind plays them. Spring and summer are peak tourist times and Marburg complies readily with red tablecloths, nesting eagles, sailing frisbees and a million diamonds floating off deck.
The shortest and longest season of the year for Marburgers is the one dubbed almost spring – the sandwiched time when skeletal leaves cling to the base of trees and underbrush collects in gray shadows at midday of any given week. Then, the lake’s saving grace is the certainty that full green is breathing somewhere close by.
Lake Marburg
Sky spins out of the lake
and spans
forever.Earth side, nothing
but brown edges shaped
by winter’s chafing.Between the two, a speck
of a man
casts his line.
- Anna Manahan Bowman