Saturday, April 27, 2019

Jason Baldinger writes

Postcard from Seawall Maine 
(for Bart Solarcyzk)
 
I asked the first rays
of the rising sun
to light my joint

the sun happily
obliged
Crashing Wave at Seawall in Acadia

2 comments:

  1. Seawall is a naturally occurring granite and loose boulder and rock seawall on the southwestern side of Mount Desert Island in Acadia National Park in Maine, near the entrance to Somes Sound. Southwest of Bar harbor, it is noted as a beautiful spot for viewing the sunrise over Great Cranberry Island, since the wetness increases the ambient reflections from the sun and the different colors in the sky and clouds. Samuel de Champlain named the island Isle des Monts Deserts (Island of Barren Mountains) in 1604. Louis XIV granted it to Antoine de la Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, in 1688 but it was ceded to England in 1713 as a result of Queen Anne's War phase of the War of the Spanish Succession. In 1880 Charles Eliot, later a prominent landscape architect, organized a group of his Harvard University classmates as the Champlain Society to study botany, geology, meteorology, marine life, ornithology, and entomology on Mt. Desert Island. He suggested that his father, Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, build a house there; a year later the elder Eliot purchased 120 acres and built the 1st summer "cottage" in Northeast Harbor. President Eliot and George B. Dorr promoted the project of making it into a park. In 1916 US president Woodrow Wilson declared it to be Sieur de Monts National Monument, named after Pierre Dugua de Mons, the founder of Port-Royal, France's 1st permanent settlement in North America. It was redesignated as Lafayette National Park in 1919, the 1st national park east of the Mississippi River, named in honor of Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette, an American Revolution general. In 1929 it was renamed Acadia National Park, in recognition of the former French colony of Acadie which once included Port-Royal and much of Maine.

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  2. Bart Solarczyk has published 9 chapbooks and a full-length collection, "Tilted World." He is the admissions director at the Holy Family institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which began as an orphanage in 1900 run by the Sisters of Holy Family of Nazareth. It evolved into a small-group living facility for children before offering outreach programs include educating behaviorally challenged children, workforce development, drug and alcohol addiction counseling, and outpatient mental health counseling. Among is poems is "Walt Whitman's Watching":

    We sweat & we wipe
    work the world's rhythm
    sway with the grass & leaves

    we drink the day's end
    ignore the astronomer
    gazing the stars in our cups

    we speak what we will
    across cyberspace
    bold water, flesh & air

    so snuggle up
    take off your clothes
    let me write a poem on you.

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