Walking Tour Maps
& Local Author Database
scroll down for
STOREFRONT POETRY
The Exeter LitFest has created two downloadable walking maps so you may go on self-guided tours any time of the year. Each is approximately one mile in length and has plenty of benches and coffee shops along the route. In addition, we offer you a downloadable spreadsheet of Exeter authors, from the 1800’s to present (updated 12/2019), with links to Wikipedia pages and websites so you may investigate them in detail. We hope you become inspired to write your own great novel, short story, or poem!
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EXETER LITFEST WALKING TOUR: This 17-stop self-guided tour highlights some of our oldest authors including one of America’s very first female novelists, Tabitha Gilman Tenney (1801), and the abolitionist poet James Monroe Whitfield (1853). It also goes right up through some of today’s leading Exeter authors such as Joe Hill (Locke & Key), John Irving (Prayer for Owen Meaney) and Dan Brown (DaVinci Code). Walk along our smooth sidewalks and let your mind’s eye paint pictures of the scenes played out in some of your favorite books.
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JOHN IRVING/PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY TOUR: Download a pdf document of a combination walking/driving tour of locations from John's life and the book. (Thanks to Bettina & Michael for suggesting an Irving tour!)
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SEPARATE PEACE TOUR: This self-guided tour takes you along with Gene and Phineas in John Knowle’s classic coming of age novel “A Separate Peace” (1959). The tour includes 17 stops, both on and off campus to many of the sites featured both in the book and in the 1972 film that was shot on location.
This 1.5 mile wheelchair-accessible loop through Phineas’ world is available for download as a PDF by clicking this link. This tour is also available in audio through your smartphone through the izi app.
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Exeter Author Database - A LitFest Exclusive:
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Click this link to view the Exeter Author Database as a PDF.
STOREFRONT POETRY
By Author, A-Z
(disclaimer - some of the formatting may have shifted)
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EXETER
The best way to see Exeter is simple: no car
required. Take the Downeaster from Dover.
It cuts through miles of woods, past farms,
UNH, and hidden homes, then runs along
the kayaks and sailboats on the Squamscott,
Exeter’s water-road to the sea. You disembark
at an old-fashioned station, walk along Main
and Water Streets. Get breakfast at Me & Ollies,
cross the String Bridge to the Public Library
for a day-long poetry festival. Afterwards,
get supper at the Italian restaurant, rummage
through Water Street Books and head back
to the station. Take a bench. Wait in the quiet
for the train from Boston. Ride back to Dover
with the stars in the dark.
John-Michael Albert, Portsmouth
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COLLOQUY
The sea shifts
and the wind and the sand,
such polyrhythms — this earthly agitation —
among the billion stars and stray planets
stretching out multitudes of light years, plowing
into the on-and-on emptiness, searchlighting.
How such a restless mess could pause
long enough to hammer out the blueprint of a cell,
then multiply it, add flagella, flippers, fins,
gills, lungs, the whole gamut of sensoria, is beyond me.
But I admire the unfailing desire to crawl out.
Above the sea, blustered about,
gannets circle and rise and arc across the sky,
fold in their wings and plummet —
bright white darts piercing the slate-green
roiling waves. Such a gorgeous,
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splattering response, this
syncopated wing-dip and rise
of body and heart,
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this
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inhale and exhale
of pure hungering after.
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F Michael Brosnan, Exeter
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OPPORTUNITY
You, having ridden your bike
to the gym, discover
the combination to unlock it
from the rack when it’s time to leave
is missing from your brain, so
you fiddle for a while to no avail
then call the daughter who owns the lock
who does not answer
then call a friend to take you home
to retrieve the scrap of paper
with the numbers needed and, waiting,
you fiddle with the lock some more
and it opens so that when
the friend arrives and offers a ride
regardless, opening the hatchback
of her car like an invitation
you load the bike into the car
exactly before the deluge starts but
you think nothing of it.
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Bill Burtis, Exeter
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MAYBE I SHOULD WRITE A HAPPY POEM
Maybe I should write a happy poem.
One about laughter and sunny days
And the joy you get,
Laying on the beach on the hot summer sand.
The very same sand that gets stuck to your back and your legs.
One about the sounds of the waves and the seagulls,
The water stealing forgotten beach chairs, the latter stealing chips and watermelon.
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But I never did like the beach.
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Maybe I should write about hugs and love.
Now that I’ve found someone of my own again.
But I always leave eventually,
Right when I get attached and want to hold on forever,
And cherish the memories I’ve made,
I let go because vulnerability is scary.
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So maybe I never liked hugs or love either.
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Maybe I should write about school,
How I work my ass off every day,
For straight A’s and recognition,
When it’d be so much easier to just
Move on and go to some third tier college.
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Because maybe I just never cared about school either.
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It must sound like I’m just not a happy person.
I do prefer to be alone
Then to take in the world around me and see all of the sadness and pain
That everyone has to go through eventually.
All of the sorrow. All of the heartbreak. All of the “I wish I hads” and “maybe ifs.”
The thirst for power
Which will eventually drive every last person crazy.
So maybe there’s just no need for me to write a happy poem.
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Kaelyn Cooper, Brentwood, Exeter High School ‘27
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APPLES ON THE STOVE
For Charlie and Joan Pratt
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First November snow—
I am home making applesauce
with the last pick from a poet’s orchard.
I offer a taste to Lukas and get the look—
son to mother and mother to son.
Approval seems to come as fist to fist—
not as the high five I remember when he was nine and ten
batting and fielding—having a slice of luck on his side.
In my own confusion of his approval, he takes my hand
curls my fingers inward, shows me how it’s done
like champions without gloves.
Our knuckles, square—drive flat and hard.
And I get it like a reverent bow.
A kitchen stirs in the wake of a nineteen-year-old—
I am home making applesauce—
glad for the orchard, the tree
pleased for the apple, the seed and sun
grateful for the rain and the bee
the tender hands that touched the tree.
Sometimes thanks comes without table or chair—
sometimes it comes as apples on the stove
and a small taste from the wooden spoon.
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Trina Daigle, Newmarket
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ANOTHER REASON
I like high tides
how the dangerous salt engines
thunder and hurl
over and over
pounding and pulling sand
erasing and redrawing the wrack line
roaring at the air and anyone who
will listen
Every twelve hours
give or take
moon speaks
and ocean answers
a conversation
thrash of water walls that
tower curl then break
I watch smell listen
for ocean’s salty bellowed replies
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Holley Daschbach, Exeter
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we imagine ourselves still
after so many miles
the stream no longer
reminding me of the same
stream from our youth
time having slimmed it down
as it smiled for one’s phone
& we had made light of it
when not so alone
whether braided or straight
its surface sunlit or in-fits
its song shared by all, rare
whether seen from my sill
where I’m top-billed, a star
or I’m here, on its banks
where a heron is posing
& appears to give thanks
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Mark DeCarteret, Rye
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CROSSING THE HOT METAL STREET BRIDGE
Though little snow has nestled us
this season, a cold snap descended
last night; felled the oaks of memory,
dammed electron bustle from home
to water pump, & left the winter birds
huddled far past their waking hour
of new solitude. Translate for us,
weatherman, this pendulum of freeze
& thaw which swings so wildly in these
final days. Where are we headed; who
knows the exit lane? At dawn, as our
collective breath hardens over the city
of industry, a chickadee, tucked alongside
another chickadee, has steeled herself
on parapet of the Hot Metal Street Bridge,
and though she cannot hope for spring—
not having the ancient mind—she makes
visible the crystal air with great insistence
that another world is coming. It has
a sound; a firmer home tucked warm
in the throat, where the song is formed.
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Samantha DeFlitch, Portsmouth
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DON’T GO
Autumn reminds us with numb precision
It isn’t safe to love.
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Its arias of attrition intone
Our fated anguish.
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You reap sings the pungent
Field what you sow.
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I swear I was just snipping daffodils, surprising
You with a jar of them on your desk!
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Remember that? And when you said you
Loved me more than the green of summer?
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Ironies abound. The absconding songbirds
Chitter about chickens coming home.
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The morning glories double down,
Trumpeting purple across the trellis.
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Why must my grief
Be the gate
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You leave through, frozen
Ajar on its ancient hinges?
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Maggie Dietz, Exeter
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PRIMODIAL
Circled under a maple, sunlit autumn
leaves rustle. A movement
turns my head.
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My gait changes
mid-stride to a slow-motion childhood
giant step; my foot falls into its
shadow—I am eye to eye
with a raptor.
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Even the leaves are quiet.
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The splayed belly
of a still-warm squirrel flashes scarlet
against a diorama turned sepia.
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Captured by the now
swiveling head standing guard over
its slaughtered mid-day meal, my being
stalls in historical quivers—humbled
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as hawk is hawk.
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Heather Dupont, Greenland
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PISCATAQUA
Before there was the bell there was the law
of sunlight catching at the eddy’s drift
cut by a paddle as the birchbark slipped
farther upriver for the fabled bay;
law of the current, law of the tidal sway
lifting the whistling groaners and the gulls’
indignant mew upon the rolling mindlessness.
Before there was the bell there was the tongue
of the river’s always-opening mouth
speaking its one syllable, Now— Now—
over and over through the monthless months,
the yearless years. (And the eddy’s echo: Once.)
People would come in time to hear it tell,
but this was all of time, before the bell.
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Todd Hearon, Exeter
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SUMMER LOVE, 1960
We talked as Girls do—
Fond, and late—
Emily Dickinson
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We fell in love the way girls do—
Braided one another’s hair—
Butterflies grew in our bellies
and telling private stories—became necessary.
We were nine years old—or maybe she was ten—
Often we sat cross-legged on her bed, holding hands.
She had thin blond hair—crooked teeth —
For Sure we’d be best friends, Forever—
I wrote letters to her all September—
even into October—No Reply—
November—a stack came back—
Return to Sender—Stamped— on every one.
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Nancy Jean Hill, Exeter
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A DREAM
Puppies in bunches, sleeping in bowls
Crowd together in fat parallel lines
Mostly dark or sepia-toned.
Amidst the brown a golden one
Squirms, mashed in the middle.
A hairy dog of dubious gray
Bends to nudge the babies
Wishing to harm or play
A bit of both, I’d say
Judging from my heart rate.
When I try to close the door
Technicolor cats want in
Gorgeous things and loud
A parade of them, slightly ominous
With an agenda all their own.
Anne Kipp, Exeter
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I ONCE HAD A PARROT
I once had a parrot
Who ate only carrot.
I thought that was terribly funny.
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Till he leapt from his cage
And as if on a stage
Went hopping around like a bunny.
J.D. Landis, Exeter
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MAPLE MANHATTAN
Five o’clock,
aged wooden bar
reminiscent of
a timeless space
in Paris.
Flurries of snow dust
the glass panes of windows,
an early March surprise.
Trees tapped for sap,
soon to be boiled down
to sweetness.
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A smoky drink of bourbon,
bitters, splash of maple syrup,
echoes of a bittersweet winter.
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A small booze-soaked cherry
lingers on the tongue
like so many
kisses once savored
during riper seasons.
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Suzanne Laurent, Portsmouth
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THE FAMILY WITH GRANDPARENTS FOR CHRISTMAS
Nana and Grandad in Wentworth Hall; dorm parents.
We four children fly like banshees through hallowed halls.
Count and hide, duck into forbidden rooms
Studded with velvet armchairs, full bookshelves.
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Christmas break, reality suspended,
no crowds of boys in blazers.
We read classics, absorb Beethoven symphonies to our cores,
play cards on oriental-carpeted floors,
Sleep in high metal beds, with starched pillowcases
and counterpane spreads.
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Christmas Eve, after the snowy walk to church,
the pageantry,
We rush to brush our teeth against sugarplums,
then straightaway to bed.
The glass transom above each door leans open
to pass the heat.
As eyes close, we ponder Santa in the pulse of echoed space.
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Erine Leigh, Portsmouth
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SHAPESHIFTING
Life seemed simple. Children were born, grew,
entered the world of the older Giants. Us. We.
We stayed much the same. Time flew
away, days caught the hours in nets of work
and life at home: meals cooked and eaten;
the half-adults instructed not to shirk
responsibility, leave essays unwritten.
And Life seemed hectic: the half-adults
needed wheels to everywhere. Elephants now,
clumsy with our own lives’ demands,
We lumbered through gymnastics,
band practice, school adventures. Time fled,
stirring up dust, as We nosed them ahead
into unknown lands.
Then Life seemed broken. We became Birds
and away they flew, falling out of our serial nests
to flutter, flitter, flounder, and find their feet:
college, marriage, journeys far away,
leaving Us to mourn what went too fast, too soon:
their smallness, sweet smiles, tears, dear things.
Above the lake, their bedrooms then
were empty of all but the call of a loon.
And suddenly, half of Us was gone
as if vanished in the night.
Life’s at its simplest now:
Half empty. All twilight.
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Pamela Marks, Exeter
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THE JOYS OF LIVER
Chicken livers fried,
calves’ liver grilled,
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best of all, my own,
just now soaking
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in a savory marinade
of malt, juniper,
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and old vine wine,
as it will again tomorrow
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and, given some restraint,
again and again
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for decades to come,
regardless of wars,
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earthquakes,
and paroxysms of the heart,
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its crazy upstairs neighbor.
All I know is,
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whoever named this organ
named it well.
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Andrew Merton, Durham
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EQUINOX
Tinctures of browns on blue, of creek
and clay, firmament and earth, a breeze
blows through and September swaggers
in, a slim hipped boy smiling cool crooked
teeth into the late inning lips of August,
infield turf burnt gold by caesarian gaze,
outfield elms swollen too green to breathe,
as the lanky angles of this kid’s long shadows
run nails across the hot diurnal drag of dirt,
of dust, kicking up us as we click heels home
a little earlier, the evening cutting into bone
a little longer, as summer swings for the fences
only to whiff and walk off while in the pitch
of pines the autumn wolf grins into his glove.
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Matt W. Miller, Exeter
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ENIGMA
Light came down like a word.
It looked like something was being said.
Its sound could not be heard.
But in the blue, it could be read.
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It was the streaks, the streams,
that held the words the way they did.
The words were born in dreams,
and when they touched the ground, they hid.
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Some words grew to be green,
they seemed to say attend to them.
And spaces in between
would have the light extend to them.
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Some words moved like a bird—
They lived in everything that grew.
And all of them preferred
not to share what the starlight knew.
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Bob Moore, East Kingston
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WE MOVED NORTH
What we learn from winter: morning has sharp teeth,
life is a process of consuming, of building reserves,
conserving more than we cast off.
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The cold months would unspool our calories,
unbundling our stores to heat its vast, glassy halls.
So we learn what the beasts already know:
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fatten up, hunker down in feathered bunkers,
tunnels of fur and flannel, sleep like black bear
or gorge on oil-rich seed, and make burnt offerings
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to the Snow Queen and the North Wind
on the altars of Jøtul, of Vermont Castings;
Under horse-hide blankets dream of blackberries.
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Andrew C. Periale, Strafford
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NIHILISM
Nothing matters.
Everything goes.
I propose your head.
You scratch yours,
look out the window.
You propose mine.
That’s fine. Call it a tie.
Off with them both.
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Two heads are better than one.
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John Perrault, North Hampton
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PORTRAIT AT 55
I was skyscraper,
girded to the stars,
blurry with city shine.
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I am sidewalk now,
cracked in curious ways,
runway for scuttling
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beetles and pavement
ants that race back
and forth for dinner.
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I used to think this
a loss, down low
on this uneven,
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overlooked spot,
crushed and scuffed
by well-worn soles.
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But look closely, tree roots
uplift fresh soil, mica
glistens in concrete.
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Kyle Potvin, Exeter
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INTO PLACE
It’s not so much a departure as an arrival,
Or rather, having arrived—as when, out driving,
You pass an orchard on a southward hill,
Old apple trees aslant in heaps of prunings.
For Sale. What do you know of apples? Still,
One morning you wake up under a different ceiling.
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And feeling that you’ve not chosen but been chosen,
Are something less than owner, more than guest.
You fertilize and mow, attend the slow
Growth of apples readying for harvest,
And settle into place like leaves or snow,
Unfold like a letter delivered as addressed.
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Charlie Pratt, Brentwood, 1935-2012
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AFTER A LONG WINTER
Snowmelt sounds like applause
slapping the flooded dooryards.
From the sky, each gull cries
a child’s laughter. The river
cheers its own weight,
having recently become
not just one thing, but many.
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Jessica Purdy, Exeter
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AT GAMPO ABBEY ON CAPE BRETON
Evening light – the sky a muddy x-ray of the human chest
I stand on a bluff over the Gulf of St. Lawrence
watching my wife and son meandering on the beach below.
I try to absorb my fear that night is coming too quickly—
can this new overlook honor the long path,
the dark beginnings that brought me to this place?
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The Buddhist monk who gives us a tour of the Abbey
speaks of his teachers, his teachers’ teachers, and their teachers
--tracing the wisdom’s lineage back more than two thousand years.
We sit together in their shrine room overlooking the sea: my son
plays with different instruments—then settles on striking the gong:
we feel its vibrations merge with our words.
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The next day, in a boat moving along the coast far below the Abbey,
while we search for pilot whales and seals in a late afternoon coolness,
I recall the monk’s translation of the name he has been given:
one who is not afraid of fear, a warrior of tenderness.
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Harvey Shepard, Exeter 1938-2022
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CONTRAPUNCTUS
My father’s bomber lost its tail here, ditched
into Alps after flattening a factory
(ball bearing). Steyr, famous for blades
since the 12th century, then for jamming
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gun barrels between the ribs of the 20th,
production limited to bikes and cars post-
War but DNA riding double with Waffenräder
(“weapon bicycles”) to the Anschluss, when Reichswerke
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reloaded. Schubert bagged a patron here,
the effervescent triplets of his “Trout” Quintet;
we’re on the Enns—Danube tributary and habitat
for namesake species (brook, rainbow, grayling)
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all riffle and rifle, pool and pistol,
finning the hotbed, the slaughterhouse of melody.
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Ralph Sneeden, Exeter
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LI/PEARS
I count twelve pears in the cardboard packaging.
I’d picked them up from the doorstep.
In the thick afternoon, the ripe sun drips
across the oriental rug.
Condolences the note says.
Ten days earlier I slid through
my phone contacts in bed, recited
the digits of Wai Gong’s number
in Mandarin. The moon spun and
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I remembered years ago
how my mother always handed
me the phone after she had urged
him to take his medicine.
The words I wanted to say
clotted on my tongue.
I covered my small face and shied away.
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I erased his number in the morning.
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Golden skin, white flesh, clear juice dribbles
The Chinese word for pear is a homophone for separation.
I turn it over in my mouth.
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Ariana Solomon, Phillips Exeter Academy ‘24
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A DAY LIKE TODAY
One with a sky wiped clean
of yellow stars and no gods who look
like us spouting off our limited language.
A day without coats and their deep
pockets of lint and crumbs reminding us
some hearts are full of money and some hands
are so cold. Such cold! A day like today
one where the ocean opens out
not a single snow-covered mountain
pass to trudge through nor grave to dig
nothing for history to be ashamed of
in the centuries to come, for it is summer
this one day, and the ships are sailing
with or without us, it is true, but at least
they look picturesque. So a day like today
billows into possible dream
an army the color of hope. Yes
we could all use just one day like today
the color of what we want remembered.
S Stephanie, Rollinsford
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WALKING BY THE EXETER RIVER IN APRIL
The afternoon is so warm,
and the soil deep-soaked from rains
that even the dying maple has buds
burgundy as the mock asparagus
that will become peonies.
Forsythia, near-drowned in March flood
tosses her hair
and names the day – yellow.
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We, too, seasonally ill-disposed
to solitude, talk carefully
of weather so suddenly lovely,
and claim almost instinctively
what is important to each of us alone,
but better scrabbled with others
in plain and vernal words …
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"Now, I call this spring, am I right?"
"Nice t'see the sun."
"Yup. Decent day for cleaning up."
"Bit warm, don’t you think?"
"They say it’s set to break a record."
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Maren C. Tirabassi, Kittery, ME
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A FOUND POEM
from
The Democratic Advocate
Westminster, Md.
July 28, 1883
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William Pitt Brown,
a brick-layer
of Baltimore,
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attempted
to hang himself
last week,
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but
the rope broke
and the next day
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Brown went
to brick-laying
again.
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Tammi Truax, Eliot, ME
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IMAGINING A SISTER
Eyes of coral, breath
Of salt air, and the mane
Of the sun.
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Face the round light above
The dry sewer cave I pretended
Was home in my teens.
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Cheeks the moth wings
I pinned to a board as a child
In August’s slow burning fuse.
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Voice a slow turning of sheet
Music on a cellist’s stand.
Lips a ballad in a minor key.
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Hands a snowstorm in early spring.
Arms a river flowing
Back into still ice.
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Heart a cross on a bare wall.
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William Varner, South Berwick, ME
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HERE AND THERE: “ OLD HOME DAY”
Exeter, New Hampshire, June 26, 1982
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This old Yankee town sets its own dates,
But from year to year I forget them.
So when the first charge of powder burst
Like a ship’s shell in the darkening
sky beyond our neighbor’s house tonight,
I remembered the evening news,
the assault on Beirut, everyone
racing through the crumbling streets, children
lying frightened in damaged hospitals.
My wife and child, knowing all along
that the Fourth comes early here, cheered
with excitement and trotted over to the park
by the river, where everyone
was watching the festive streaks and flashes
lighting the local sky with sudden spangles
of gold, white, red, and filling the summer air
with the shouts of innocent bombs.
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David Weber, 1943-2023
Founding member, Exeter LitFest
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LATE AFTERNOON UNDER THE MAPLE TREE
Look straight into it. There are no words for it,
the unknowable, inaudible vapor trail
we ride.
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I’m not afraid, my friend says, her bedside lamp
dressed in silk, her kiln between firings.
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She hands me a porcelain bowl with a gold-leafed
repair –
a crack filled with light.
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For the soul to exit? No, she says, for the unexpected,
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– the gate left open.
for Kit
Mimi White, Exeter