Village Poets of Sunland-Tujunga are pleased to present Northern California poet, Nancy Cavers Dougherty as Featured Poet for the Monthly Poetry Reading on Zoom, held on Sunday, May 23, 2021 at 4:30 pm on Zoom.
Please email Maja@moonrisepress.com and /or DMHSkiles@gmail.com if you would like to join us and receive the Zoom link. Two segments of open mic for poets (two poems each) will also be available, before and after the featured poet. Please, provide refreshments to yourself on your own. Alas, we still have to wait for the re-opening of the Bolton Hall Museum where we could provide our poetic guests with tasty treats.
Nancy Cavers Dougherty, whose love of the creative arts goes back to her childhood in Massachusetts, is the author of three chapbooks Tape Recorder On, Memory In Salt, Levee Town and Silk, a collaborative work. Her poetry has appeared in Westview, The Pinch, the California Quarterly, I-70 Review, descant, Compass Rose, Big Scream, The Timberline Review, West Marin Review, Quiet Diamonds of The Orchard Street Press, and other journals.
She holds a BA in history from Northwestern University and a master’s degree in public administration from Sonoma State University. She lives in Sebastopol, California where she has been an advocate for teen counseling services in the high schools and art-making in group settings. She is the proud mother of three and grandmother of two.
Was a Turtle
after Was a Man by Philip Booth
Home
was
parasol to sun
Whipped by spring winds
fragrant with love
and song
blue jays and robins
Was citadel to grooving
down dirt of possibility
so what if grounded
in scute-ness and angles
beneath Icarus shadow
Was woman
with tresses locked
in turret
of keratin
a-moving past muck
glassy-eyed gaggle
pond of stares
and squawks
Dome of complacency
this
Home
The Boy and Big Foot
The fable has it—the tracks
lead way back lead through
Norwegian Woods under bright day-night sky
echo-less starless like this night
I close the book, and tuck him in
before the muffled steps of a full-grown Big Foot
will tread into his slumber—my young boy
dreaming his favorite cotton blankie
clenched in mouth the darkness
of his night reflected in window an ant
crawls upon windowsill the Stephen Kings
await him on his parents’ bookshelves
secure among the volumes beyond, the stories
rustle among the eucalyptus
silver crescent of leaves stirring
his night imagination in mighty excursions
I’d tip toe in and fold his blanket over and
tug the one out gently, to leave by his hand
