A. Christine Myers, writer, returns
with apologies, explanations, and, yes, poetry!
Dear friends,
It has been a strange, difficult, productive, often beautiful, and occasionally hellish six months(!!) since you have heard from me via email. For this delay, I apologize.
Put bluntly, I have been working through (dare I admit) forty-seven+ years of trauma over a mere eighteen months of being on my own, trying to readjust my thinking and my life. Not surprisingly, perhaps, a number of projects have slowed down or simply been put on pause. This newsletter being one of them…
But, I am returning to the newsletter now. At long last, you might well say, and I wouldn’t disagree… A lot has happened in all of our lives since I sent the last one: holidays, winter weather, the entrance of a new year, and, so tragically, a pandemic.
Yet this only makes sharing words and beauty more important than ever. So I am blowing the dust and cobwebs off this Substack site, and making changes to allow for me to keep it up more easily.
One thing in particular I am going to change. Instead of sending you links to my works on Medium, I am simply going to send the poems, etc. to you directly, here. I worried when I began all this that doing so would spam your inboxes. But perhaps it would be better to try a course of too many, rather than too few! You can, of course, always let me know if it gets overwhelming. You can even unsubscribe if need be, so I think I shall get my courage up and send things to you as I write them.
And speaking of such things, I do want each of you to know that I would love feedback if you like to send it. The move to a newsletter does not by any means imply that I prefer a one-way conversation nowadays! It does mean that I feel more comfortable with a little more privacy and a more direct conversation.
As for the poetry and other writings, I shall simply begin with my most recent, and over succeeding weeks I’ll be adding in the works missed from these past months.
So, to begin, here is a sonnet just completed today:
The First Firefly
The sky is blank before the moon arrives;
Nor midday blue nor midnight black its arc,
But grey as though the stars within their hives
Were dripping light quite slowly in the dark
And waiting till the last and faintest spark
From day flows finally from the sky. I see
The moon waits long, these nights, to melt the stark
Low eastern edge of shadow, tree by tree.
For now the dusk still deepens. All in me
Waits wistful in the emptiness around,
Till yellow fleck of light bursts suddenly
Upon the darkness, flies from grass and ground
To drift upon the meadow, wing the still
Cool night, its soft gleam warm upon the hill.