Claire Keyes, Poet
Salem State College's own Professor Emerita Claire Keyes' poems and reviews have appeared in such journals as Valparaiso Review, Calyx, Blueline, and The Women's Review of Books, as well as in several anthologies, including Letters to the World: Poems from the Wom-Po Listserv and Poems of Exotic Places. She is a recipient of a grant in poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and a fellowship from the Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico. Her chapbook, Rising and Falling, won the Foothills Poetry Competition. The Question of Rapture, a book of poems, was recently published by Mayapple Press.
DEVEREUX BEACH by Claire Keyes
If I remain parked here long enough, facing the beach.
If the waves roll in to crash in foaming curls, the sea
gray-blue and inviting only to a dog who dares the surf,
then skitters back, playing its own game. If raindrops
hit the windshield, then slide down, slick-silver ribbons.
If I listen to Celtic music on the radio and think of my mother,
just a girl crossing this same ocean when the only way out
of Ireland was by sea. If it's still that girl--fatherless at six,
motherless at ten--who engages me: that thirteen year-old
lady's companion, her passage paid. If she was pushed
to approach the unknown, resisted, shook its hand, shivered.
If she was brave. I don't know. If I'm now a year older
than she was when she died: matron, wife, mother of eight.
If the mind insists on imagining its origins, then it comes
to this wintry beach, waves pulsing towards shore.
