Mary Elder Jacobsen’s poetry has appeared in journals such as Cold Mountain Review, The Cincinnati Review, Green Mountains Review, and deLuge, to name a few, and has been selected for Poetry Daily and the anthologies Birchsong, Vol. II, and Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection. She holds graduate degrees from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, where she was a Teaching Fellow, and UNC-Greensboro. A recipient of a Vermont Studio Center residency, she is co-organizer of the reading series Words Out Loud, held in conjunction with Art at the Kent in Calais, Vermont, where she lives on a dirt road surrounded by water, woods, and meadows.

DRAGONFLY by Mary Elder Jacobsen

 
Late morning, one settles down on a leaf afloat,
plying his chain-mail oars, his little raft a fragile boat.

My father would say darner where I saw “dragonfly.”
Who knows any longer what a darner is? Time flies.

Late afternoon, Lake’s hem unraveling, Sun squints
toward dusk—leaning in to finish her day’s stitches.

Evening now, I listen to one upstairs window closing
as I turn to open up another, letting a Luna moth go,

then watch as my father, grown tired, senses the fading
light above the fabric knee patch he’s been sewing.

Handing me his spool and needle, he smiles just to see
how easily I swim his thread through the oh-so-tiny eye.

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