Thank you for your small, cool parkness:
even when summer swaggers & swelters
with the hot rush loud of crowds,
in you I can be soothed
by the tenderness of silence, away
from a world that’s always screaming.
Thank you for climbable cliffs at Great Head
& cobblestones at Little Hunter’s. Thank you
for Cadillac’s pink granite at sunrise
& the crash-boom-bah of Thunder Hole at dusk.
Thank you for Duck Brook & Eagle Lake,
for Bar Island at low tide & Sand Beach
at high. Thank you for the Beehive
& the Bowl, for the Bubbles & the Triad.
Thank you for pitch-perfect vistas
alongside pitch pine at Otter Point
& dogs off-leash at Little Long Pond.
Thank you for azalea gardens at Asticou
& cedar bog walks around Jordan Pond.
Thank you for Flying Mountain & Wonder-
land, for the sheer of the Precipice in daytime
& late night starry skies over Somes Sound.
Thank you for offering those who love mountains
a chance to coincide
with those who love the sea. Thank you
for knowing how much we need
variety & coexistence, & for your forever
compassionately understanding
as we wander aimlessly
in lives overwrought with differences
& fraught in overwhelmedness.
Most of all, thank you for returning me
to my shore when my tide
is prone to ebbing.
Though I can’t get with you
near as often as I’d like,
you’re never far
from where I live.
And as long as you’re there,
I can stand to be here
a little while more than longer.
—
Anne Rankin’s poems have appeared in such journals as The Healing Muse, Passager, Scapegoat Review, Atlanta Review, Kelp Journal, Does It Have Pockets?, kerning, Rattle, Maine Public Radio’s Poems from Here, and elsewhere. Her poem “Small Primer on Loneliness” received Honorable Mention at the Belfast Poetry Festival 2021. Her essays have appeared in The Columbus Dispatch, The Mount Desert Islander, The Washington Post, and elsewhere.
