Poem on a Line by Heather Dohollau
Il faut attendre dans l’ailleurs d’ici
(You have to wait in the elsewhere of here)
—tr. Hoyt Rogers
You could have taken a seat on the settee of yesterday;
you will lounge on the lawn of the future,
though now it’s just seeds and raked dirt.
But meanwhile, you have to wait
in the elsewhere of here, and it’s
never easy. This is where the heart is;
there’s no place like it. But the grass is always greener.
You’ll want to be somewhere else, lonely hunter.
Where can you find happiness? Click your heels together.
Long shadows linger on the lawn.
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Barbara Crooker has published poems in magazines such as Yankee, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Denver Quarterly; anthologies including Worlds in their Words: An Anthology of Contemporary American Women Writers (Prentice Hall) and Boomer Girls (University of Iowa Press); eleven chapbooks; and two full-length collections: Radiance, which won the Word Press First Book Award and was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, and Line Dance, recently out from Word Press. She has received three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships in Literature, the W. B. Yeats Society of NY Prize (Grace Schulman, judge) and the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award (Stanley Kunitz, judge).
