Katharyn Howd Machan – String Poet

2015 String Poet Second Place

Rhodonite. Red clay compressed.
Rose quartz flecked with the best that shadows
can offer a world of loss.

When his shoulder scraped its edge
his startled blood issued forth like the prayers
worshippers in need would utter daily.

Carpenter boy alive with light
his mother kissed and brought to earth
to share with a practical man.

Plain brick. Shining stone.
Who can name what death calls?
Living flesh of a miraculous being

dragged through dust into destiny,
blessing a simple structure built
by whatever served, what came to hand.

Katharyn Howd Machan, Professor of Writing at Ithaca College in central New York, holds degrees from the College of Saint Rose, the University of Iowa, and Northwestern University. Her poems have received many awards and have appeared in numerous magazines and in anthologies and textbooks such as The Bedford Introduction to Literature, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013, Poetry: An Introduction, Early Ripening: American Women’s Poetry Now, Sound and Sense, Writing Poems, and Literature: Reading and Writing the Human Experience. The most recently published of her 32 collections are Wild Grapes: Poems of Fox (Finishing Line Press, 2014—first runner up in national contest), H (Gribble Press, 2014—national winner) and When She’s Asked to Think of Colors (Palettes & Quills Press, 2009—national winner). Former director of the national Feminist Women’s Writing Workshops, Inc., she edited Adrienne Rich: A Tribute Anthology (Split Oak Press, 2012).