Excerpt from “The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes”
~ Seamus Heaney

History says don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
on the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
and cures and healing wells.

Ffynnon Gofer, Llanover, Wales

I Dreamed Again
~ Anne Michaels

I dreamed again you were alive, and woke
certain it was your voice
love is whisky, it is milk,
it is water don’t ever, you said in the dream,
think I’ve gone

I woke a little more, a moment or two,
then remembered. Memory makes it so. Keeps you
under the trees.

So I did not turn on the lamp
but lay until I felt again your warmth with mine
heard your voice in my hair

I lay there a long time,
forgetting

Friendship
~ Dinah Maria Craik

Oh, the comfort —
the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person —
having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words,
but pouring them all right out,
just as they are,
chaff and grain together;
certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them,
keep what is worth keeping,
and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.

Fiction
~ Keith Leonard

If I get the story right,
my mother’s grief
will melt back into sand—
just enough for a shoreline
the size of her driveway.
We could hold our shoes
by their heels without talking.
In this version, I know
the password to leaven
the latch of fingers
wrapped around aluminum.
I hold a compact mirror
up to her nose to see the fog
of the living. If I get the story
right, a fog will settle
over the shore and there
will be no other place to look
but at each other.

The Source
~ Joshua Mehigan

Water is the least environmentally impactful
bev­erage and bottled water is the most environmen­tally
responsible packaged drink choice.
—INTERNATIONAL BOTTLED WATER ASSOCIATION

Far from these woods and this river, far from the Source,
in a made place not easy to comprehend,
harder than woods and river but much less hard,
where sky and grass are priceless or must be shared,
and shade is rectilinear and smooth;
where the scourge teems upward in tall elaborate mounds,
and doom seeps outward, settling a dull gray crust
over what once were woods and river like these;
in the back of a double-locked shelter in a room where salt
and bread are kept safe from the rain, from rats and starlings,
in a humming iron chest that holds inside it
fresh weather like that of a day between fall and winter;
on a crowded shelf of that chest stands a vessel pressed
from molecules of degraded plantlife and creatures;
and there, in that thin vessel—that is where
the creature, exiled forever from the Source,
further and further cut off from woods and river,
keeps for itself eight handfuls of the river.
It opens the door of the chest. It stands and drinks.
The once-living bottle is see-through like the contents,
the label of vegetable fiber the color of envy.