Lynn Veach Sadler

2009 Creekwalker Poetry Prize Finalist

Former college president Dr. Lynn Veach Sadler has published widely in academics and various literary magazines.  A fiction/creative nonfiction writer, and playwright, she  has published widely in academics and creative writing.  Ms. Sadler has published four chapbooks; has two more and a full-length collection in press; and has published four chapbooks; won The Pittsburgh Quarterly’s Hay Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Hemley Award, and Asphodel’s Poetry Contest and tied for first place in Kalliope’s Elkind Contest.  One story appears in Del Sol’s Best of 2004 Butler Prize Anthology.  A novel will soon join her novella and short-story collection, and she was named 2007 Writer of the Year by California’s elizaPress.  She won the 2009 overall award (poetry and fiction) of the San Diego City College National Writer’s Contest and City Works Journal.  A play on Frost was a Pinter Review Prize for Drama Silver Medalist, and she won the 2008 Pearson Award at Wayne State for Second-Time-Around, a play on the Iraq wars.  

She has traveled around the world five times, writing all the way, and now works full-
time as a creative writer and an editor.

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THE TREASURE INSIDE DISCARDED THINGS

A man of hard luck, Brady Jefcoat.
Dirt poor family, wreck-ruined right hand,
June peach of a wife early dead by cancer.

What saved him?
An 1877 Edison phonograph he was given
because it didn’t work.
Fixing was the ticket, took his mind off grief.
A thousand irons, over a 100 Daisy air rifles,
anything broken that he could save.

The Brady C. Jefcoat Museum of Americana
is his monument to “people who tinkered,
who fiddled with things.”

Oh, the Smithsonian has wooed him,
but he’s turned a deaf ear--
“they’d just hide it all away.”
He wants the world to see
what it has thrown away,
what he’s made beautiful again.

He’s deeded everything he has
to local historic associations
that begged him to speak on
his gears, his vacuum tubes . . . .

“There’s treasure inside discarded things.
You just have to work a little harder
to make it show through.”




BREAKING . . . FISH . . . TOGETHER

Cleaning—emptying--
the fish they’ve caught,
the couple fills itself/themselves.
Long years together.
Years of fish.

He never said, “Wives clean fish.”
She never said, “When you’ve
cleaned the fish, bring them to me.”

Skin speckled like fish.
Wrinkles, glasses,
but emptying the fish
renews in its ritual;
sight sees again as sight is seen.

Sacred, this act.
Fish and hands in bloodied water,
liquid consecrated.  So pure
jewelry need not be removed.
They break . . . fish . . . together.




PROPHET NOT WITHOUT HONOR EXCEPT IN HER OWN HEAD

She invited us for “tea,” quite quaint enough,
but the “Sun Room” where she “painted”
was a-teem with canvases of “tree stumps,”
as she pronounced them, though she would not
permit us to pass the threshold.

As well as I could see, some reached
higher than what-to-me-are-stumps
but not far enough for branches, leaves.
Two “stumps” of a height
stood each as if the other’s branches
were its limbs akimbo,
but the twain never touched.

When I probed, she said she did not know
why she “fixated upon tree stumps,”
for she had no cause to find them special.
When I asked if her stumps were “drawn”
from reality or its photographs, she smiled--
“I cut pictures from magazines to use.”
“Shades of Plato,” I thought,
“with artist at a remove from Stumpness.”
I did not mention Plato.

Nor did I divagate of Dagon,
fallen, time and time, face upon the threshold,
palms cut off, only stump left.
But the back story raised some hope.




DEFECTION FROM REFRACTION

The twin-legged compass
with which God spun the world
was crystalline—diamond—an emblem.
It formed the world,
God’s playing field, in facets, true,
but as a diamond gemstone
mounted in a circle.

Humans cannot comprehend perfection.
Perfection mocks us,
was meant to.  We chose,
in our acuteness, to give the world
four imagined corners,
to lay it out as lozenge.
We learned our obtuseness.

Can humans profit from perfection?
We choose, daily,
whether to be abrasive,
cutting only, fractious,
or whether to accept the refractivity
that is ours to claim,
to be small diamonds
that can bend—to mend--
ourselves, our ways.
As individuals, mind you.
Individuals only!




SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, AMERICAN STYLE

The string art Hezzie and Mattieline taught her on the rare occasions
the barn hands emptied a truck before the boy brought the next load of
tobacco from the field.  A Sunday outfit, even if it was a dress.  The
opening of the eyes of a baby squirrel one of the logging crew brought
in from the woods for her.  A myriad of other happenings recording in
her wrinkling brain against future need.  Each item offering itself as
puzzle.  She was after, not so much meaning, but meaningfulness.




© Copyright Lynn Veach Sadler.  All rights reserved.