Woodstock Poetry Society
Featured Reading and Open Mike
Saturday, May 8th, 2021 at 2pm

via Zoom

Judith Saunders
Raphael Kosek

Poets Judith Saunders and Raphael Kosek will be the featured readers, followed by an open mike when the Woodstock Poetry Society meets virtually via Zoom on Saturday, May 8th, 2021 at 2pm.

WPS meetings are held the 2nd Saturday (2pm) of every month.

Due to the ongoing pandemic - for now, all meetings will be held virtually via Zoom
The Zoom app can be downloaded here: Zoom Download Center

To attend: contact phillip@woodstockpoetry.com to receive Zoom info
If attending, please indicate if you would like to be on the open mike. Thank you.

The reading will be hosted by poet Phillip X Levine. All meetings are free, open to the public, and include an open mike.

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Features:

Judith Saunders - Judith Saunders has been publishing poetry, humor, and creative nonfiction for the past twenty-five years. Her work has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies with both regional and national audiences: her poems have been published recently, for example, in The Mathematical Intelligencer, Chronogram, Blue Unicorn, Chiron Review, Poet Lore, ISLE, Snowy Egret, and South Carolina Review. She is the author of two prize-winning chapbook collections of poetry.



Ghost Dance for the Moa

At home in their island world—
pleasantly subtropical, safely
remote—the moa didn’t need
to fly. They were biggest
and fastest in a kingdom
of birds, a place “full of noises,”
Captain Cook reported, loud
with chirping, squawking music:
incessant “sounds and sweet airs.”

No four-legged predators
or egg-sucking snakes posed
threats to the wingless giants.
Flight would be no defense
against eagles that swooped
from the sky, attacking chicks
and unwary adults. Simpler
to retreat to wooded areas,
consume the lush vegetation there
(grasses, fruits, and leafy shrubs)
scissoring fibrous stems
with specially adapted beaks.
“Dominant herbivore”
in its isolated habitat,
the moa matured slowly
and bred at leisurely intervals,
producing small, infrequent
batches of enormous eggs.

Suddenly the future arrived:
mammals entered the pastoral,
strange shapes walking upright,
flexing prehensile appendages.
They had big brains, sharp spears,
and dogs—everything they needed
to slaughter a species
of hugely conspicuous, flightless birds.

Soon the moa’s flesh was changed
to meat, their skin to garments,
their eggs to bowls, their bones
to tools and jewelry: fish hooks,
spear hafts, pendants, poles.
For one gory century their bodies
fed and clothed, adorned, equipped
and armed those colonists
from an unimagined elsewhere,
boatloads of hungry Prosperos
come to dispossess, depopulate.

What remains of the moa lies
scattered in museums, bits
of feather, beak and bone
waiting for history
to unmake itself, brooding
on the potent art,
the airy song, of resurrection,
return to avian Eden.

-Judith Saunders

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Raphael Kosek - Raphael Kosek’s poems have appeared in such venues as Poetry East, Catamaran, and Briar Cliff Review. Her latest chapbook, Rough Grace won the 2014 Concrete Wolf Chapbook Prize. Her lyric essays won first prize at Bacopa Review (2017) and Eastern Iowa Review (2016). She won the Bacopa Review’s 2019 poetry contest (Pushcart Prize nominee). Her full-length poetry book, American Mythology, was recently released by Brick Road Poetry Press and Garrison Keillor has chosen two poems from it for The Writer’s Almanac. She teaches English at Marist College where her students keep her real. She is the 2019-2020 Dutchess County NY Poet Laureate.



When the saints come among us

they leave the scent of burning orange
in the stairwell, or the ragged thread
from some holy sleeve caught
on a nail. They slip by like leaves
dropping unceremoniously, done
with summer’s hoopla.
Their beauty goes undetected like
the rosy underbelly of mourning doves
waddling the ground beneath the feeder—
all we see is the soft grey-brown,
surprised to catch a glimpse of pink
dawn on the warm breasts
if we are lucky.

When the saints come among us
there is no wind lifting the curtains
over the sill but when we look out
we are taken again by the purple
mountains repeating themselves
in the distance.

When the saints come among us
the cry of the hawk punctuates
our sleeping and our waking,
calling us to all that is unnamed
but keener than a slim blade
piercing the only body we know.

-Raphael Kosek

Bacopa Literary Review

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Developing WPS 2021 Schedule - all readings held via Zoom
All of 2021 Events: Events

Due to the ongoing pandemic - for now, all meetings will be held virtually via Zoom
The Zoom app can be downloaded here: Zoom Download Center

To attend: contact phillip@woodstockpoetry.com to receive Zoom info
If attending, please indicate if you would like to be on the open mike following the featured readers. Thank you.

01/January 9th - Canceled
02/February 13th - Canceled
03/March 13th - Guy Reed; Victoria Sullivan via Zoom
04/April 10th - Judith Kerman; Leslie Gerber via Zoom
05/May 8th - Judith Saunders; Raphael Kosek via Zoom
06/June 12th - Elizabethanne Spiotta; William Seaton via Zoom
07/July 10th - Barbara Ungar; Lucia Cherciu via Zoom
08/August 14th - Irene Sipos; Perry S. Nicholas via Zoom
09/September 11th - Nine-Eleven 20 years later via Zoom
                             To present during this event - email: phillip@woodstockpoetry.com
10/October 9th - Jacqueline Ahl; Philip Pardi via Zoom
11/November 13th - Elizabeth Cohen; Mary Leonard via Zoom
12/December 11th - Amy Ouzoonian; Anique Taylor and Annual Business Meeting via Zoom

Also, why not become a 2021 Member or donate to the Woodstock Poetry Society?

Membership is $20 a year. (To join or donate, send your check to the Woodstock Poetry Society, P.O. Box 531, Woodstock, NY 12498. Include your email address as well as your mailing address and phone number. Or join online at: www.woodstockpoetry.com/become.html). Your membership helps pay for our upgraded Zoom account, post-office-box rental, the WPS website, and costs associated with publicizing the monthly events. One benefit of membership is the opportunity to have a brief biography and several of your poems appear on this website.

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