Meredith Davies Hadaway
Spin
i.
Full moon, crying geese.
Unlike me, they know which way
the wind is blowing.
ii.
Not in your lifetime,
we tell ourselves as fires blaze,
waters rise, ice groans.
iii.
Because we all share
one heart, it is always beat-
ing, always breaking.
iv.
Reeling on all fronts
—earth calls it spinning as it
orbits, unaware.
v.
Too late we learn that
trees are gods. Their soft breath swells
our lungs as they fall.
Tired of Words
The ones that matter come back
to me as fragrance. I’m in
a garden I don’t remember
planting, alive with bees.
Which syllables count?
If we knew for sure, we
could leave the rest silent.
Hard to find in a stack
of pages—the right word
shines in a dark room. Call
it teal, river’s morning glow.
Call it gold, the bright shore
it wanders through.
If only we could be one thing, one
thing, and then another.
Meredith Davies Hadaway
Meredith Davies Hadaway is the author of three poetry collections, including At The Narrows (winner of the Delmarva Book Prize for Creative Writing). She has received fellowships and awards from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and the Maryland State Arts Council as well as multiple Pushcart nominations. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts and was, for ten years, poetry editor for The Summerset Review. Hadaway served as the Sophie Kerr Writer-in-Residence at Washington College, Spring 2022.