SANDRA LARKIN - POEMS

Sandra Larkin studied poetry at Emerson College with the late James Randall, and at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her work has been published in Evergreen Review, New England Review, and the Bitchin’ Kitsch. Sandra is a member of the Boston Harbor Poets and enjoys coffee, kayaking, and reading. The Atlantic Ocean once tried to kill her, but failed.

​Common Ground

A man turns dirt by hand, makes a brown bed
from lanky grass he should have mowed a week ago,
unearths a dormant seed of memory 

not his own: summer morning a century past,
dew on the same patch of earth he is working,
a child digging, dress-hem damp with mud.

Hands picking roses and lavender to set
by the half-empty bed, a son at his desk
penning the first draft of a eulogy, 

a man thinking about his coming crop 
of squash the woman in the bed will never eat.
The undertaker repainting his black cart.


​

What We Have Built
​

Decades after broken ground 
cradled the cornerstone, this
cathedral is ill-designed,
buttressed at odd angles. 
It will never be complete.  

Side chapels lack doors, 
plywood screens sliver 
glimpses of carved-marble 
histories lying on their backs, 
arms folded,  still. Gargoyles 
mutter, disfigured by dull chisels, 
ugly even for gargoyles.

Untrained as masons or carpenters,
we were born to the trade 
of improvisation, jazz hammers 
syncopating granite bells, organ
pipes breathless with wishing.

On the seventh day, we exhale:
full-grown saints unfurl through
open roof-beams. Our tools
lie down, say their own prayers.
Tomorrow, we pick them up again.

TV at 38,000 feet: a triptych
​

1. News

In the seat next to mine 
a stranger sleeps. The tiny
screen in front of him presents
a silent digest of recent dramas.

Someone's house has exploded.
Someone's aged mother is missing.
Somewhere, a crowd fights with armed officers. 
The words "Violent Clash" float under the scene.
It doesn't tell me where.

We return to the mother's car, 
abandoned beside a field, doors open.  
Her smiling photo says
everything was fine
until it wasn't.

2. Weather Channel

A hurricane's color-coded spin
gives way to a ponytailed man
who promises help me learn 
to survive in the wild.

Say you break a leg while hiking
alone on a mountainside, 
he says.  Here's what you do,
to keep it from killing you.

I don't hike alone, or often, 
or, to be honest, at all.  Tell me 
what happens if this plane doesn't 
crash: will we land in the rain?

3. Funniest

A montage: quick clips, 
people dancing clumsily
the way we do at home, 
or at a friend's wedding.  
Then, falling. 

I am meant to laugh.

Each scene cut off
before the child wails, before
the moment of searing
pain and fear when the man 
tries to get u
and can't. 



​

fourth
​

sparks bloom and fade
glitter storm of boom and crack
glowering over a dark crowd

dogs tremble in tune
with a few who know this
drum and hammer-song by heart

we celebrate our freedom to
trust this deafening festival
is not ruin rumbling to meet us

as we wander home
children on our shoulders
in the chilling air



​