Robert Demaree- Poetry

TANKA DIARY: 2009—2014

June 2009:

I-81 north:

Old guys with Florida plates,

Bound for New England

Maybe the Adirondacks,

Perhaps the Thousand Islands

January 2010

January day:

Leafless trees against blue sky;

Birds crowd the feeder,

Goldfinches in winter garb,

Muted Eddie Bauer green.

July 2012

Foggy summer day,

Cannot see the Isles of Shoals.

Walk on gravel beach,

Cairns silhouetted in mist.

I add a rock to the pile.

August 2013

Stopped at the border,

Into Maine from New Brunswick,

We have been profiled:

Senior citizens suspect,

Contraband prescription drugs.

October 2014

Sugar maple, oak,

Umber in the gray-white mist:

October foliage,

As though light shown from within:

Quiet New Hampshire morning

THE MORNING OF THE SANDWICH FAIR

It is the morning of the Sandwich Fair.

Summer people come back to New Hampshire in October:

A giddy sense of trespass

Where the tangents of everyday lives touch, briefly.

We are sharers of space, of holy ground,

Eavesdroppers, bound by the accident of juxtaposition,

By random consecutiveness.

At the craft shop mothers with children of different ages

Mill about. The women order wedding presents

With a certain vacant self-absorption.

The children have opted out of the pewtersmith’s tour;

They careen around the shop, handling the merchandise

And each other: home schoolers on an outing, we conclude.

At the restaurant four classmates,

Over fifty but not quite our age,

Critique a class reunion.

They lament poor attendance at the dinner,

The choice of entree, time’s unkindness.

We drive on, regarding each maple, each sumac

As though leaves might not turn again.

At the Sandwich Fair Amanda Glidden awaits the pony pulling,

Her sheep judged runners up to best of show.

“The Morning of the Sandwich Fair” appeared in the 2010 Poets’ Guide to New Hampshire

Robert Demaree is the author of three book-length collections of poems, including After Labor Day, published in April 2014 by Beech River Books.  In 2013 his poems received first place in competitions sponsored by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire and the  Burlington Writers Club He is a retired school administrator with ties to North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, where he lives four months of the year. His poems have appeared in 150 periodicals. For further information see http://www.demareepoetry.blogspot.com