PUBLIC POETRY PROJECT
A celebration of poems to the people
The Lighthouse
By Liz Rosenberg
Liz Rosenberg’s “The Lighthouse” expands our
appreciation for something everyday. The imagination that wants
to live as a single watching eye reveals a speaker aspiring to
be something larger, something greater, than she might be.
Once When I Was in the Eighth Grade
By Maurice Kilwein Guevara
Maurice Kilwein Guevara’s “Once When I Was in the
Eighth Grade” captures that moment school children yearn
for, the withering answer. In this case, the image is so striking,
otherworldly and tragic, that the window becomes the domain of
the speaker, and the act of witnessing something great.
Pagan
By Beth Scroggin
Beth Scroggin’s “Pagan” casts birds into menacing
light, as nightmares, as something tearing at the sky—tying
image to emotion in a brief and intense piece.
Courage, or One of Gene Horner's Fiddles
By Lisa Coffman
Lisa Coffman’s “Courage, or One of Gene Horner’s
Fiddles” conflates courage and music, a moment of witness
and a moment of shame.
Lisa Coffman's poetry reading 
Fire in the Onion Field
By Deborah Burnham
Deborah Burnham’s vivid and searing depiction, “Fire
in the Onion Field,” focuses a disastrous event on the death
of a mole. But the mole does not understand what happens to him
and, in the poem’s closing moment, swims across the sun—a
metaphor for transcendence.
The Earliest Memory
By Margaret Almon
Margaret Almon’s “The Earliest Memory” works
to capture the ineffable in images, ranging from pebbles to the
red fish at the poem’s closing. Each image is small, transitional,
fleeting, like memory can itself be.
Two honorable mention poems were also selected: "Song of the Seeing Eye Dog" by Alyce Wilson and "Sometimes I Dream of Freeways" by Anna Manahan Bowman.