On the Great Marsh

“April is National Poetry Month. What better way to celebrate than with the Thursday Poets! Watch for us every Thursday as we offer poems and insights that help connect us to the community and beyond.”

by Dawn Paul

Have you ever fallen in love with a landscape? Not just the rush of a breathtaking view but a deep love that inspires and refreshes you through the years. My landscape is the Great Marsh, especially the portion of it that runs along the coast of northern Essex County, Massachusetts, where the land meets the sea. It is an open place of grassy high marsh and muddy creeks, bordered on the east by sand dunes and forest to the west. It is a place of great beauty, but I must be honest here—it can be a harsh place with icy winds or blazing sun, mosquitoes, and small biting flies. But it is a place to which I return, each time feeling refreshed and often finding something new that begins a poem. I have seen the sun rise and set there, watched skunks amble up a grassy slope, and listened to a great horned owl hooting from a stand of pine trees. I have also led back to my car, pursued by deer flies! But on its best days, the marsh is quiet. I walk and take some notes, but mainly look and listen.

I currently have more than fifty poems inspired by the Great Marsh. Each one I finish feels like the last—until the next time I drive the narrow road past beach houses and dunes, park my car and walk. Then I find a fox track or hear the surf beating the beach beyond the dunes and another poem suggests itself. As a friend of mine told me when I handed her what I called my last marsh poem: “That marsh isn’t done with you yet!”

Andrea Skevington’s poem below references a marsh in England—but it shares the ecosystem of New England:

Waldringfield saltmarshes – seal

This thin strip of solid ground
turns away from the shore,
snaking through saltmash –
sea lavender, sea purslane,
samphire glowing
in the fading light,
the saltsmell of algae –
until we are far from
ploughed earth,
far out on this wide,
flat, dizzying
land-water-scape.

Poem: Waldringfield salt marshes – seal

Photo: By Doc Searls CC BY-SA 2.0

Dawn Paul is working on a series of poems about North Shore’s Great Salt Marsh. She is the author of the novels The Country of Loneliness and Still River. Her poetry chapbook What We Still Don’t Know examines the contradictions in the life of scientist Carl Linnaeus, originator of the Linnaean biological naming system used worldwide today. Paul has been a recipient of residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, the Ragdale Foundation, the Spring Creek Project, Friday Harbor Marine Laboratories and Isles of Shoals Marine Labs. Her poetry has been published in anthologies, journals and most recently,Orion Magazine. Also look for it engraved in the sidewalk on Cabot Street in downtown Beverly!