Poems are everywhere: a conversation with Meg Weston and Margaret A. Haberman

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share and examine their work, produced and moderated by John Gillespie. Episode 8 features Meg Weston and Margaret A. Haberman, both of The Poets Corner. Margaret reads “The Redemption Center” and Meg reads “The Island in the Middle” from Margaret and Meg’s collection, To the Point and Back: Swimming Poems.  The Redemption Center By Margaret Haberman What I wish I was doing was swimming instead of standing outside of the redemption center in the hot sun waiting with a small tribe of strangers for our turn to go inside the air conditioned building. That makes it sound desirable. But AC is all that’s appealing about the dark paneled room with a wall fridge full of discount beer and the smell of old cigarettes and alcohol. There’s a man inside with large black trash bags full of bottles—you can’t see what kind. Intriguing to wonder. I’m third in line after he’s done,which doesn’t seem like it’s going to be anytime soon. At first those of us on the outside can look through the open door and see the dim interior and the dubious progress of the black trash bags, but then someone closes the door and we’re left in the heat and the sliver of shade on the side of the parking lot where the roof hangs down. So, we have to rely on peering through the dirty glass of the door to see any hope of getting this task done before noon. All of us are waiting, this little community of strangers who want or need a bit of cash, so we’re going to wait in the hot sun in July wondering how long it will be and if it’s worth the wait. There’s some parable of business— sunken costs—that has to do with investment of time and money, I can’t remember how I know that, but the longer I wait, the harder it is to leave. The guy smoking unfiltered cigarettes tells me that the dude inside with the black trash bags has SEVEN bags which we later confirm was only SIX when thirty minutes later the contents have all been counted and the owner of them, who’s kind of to blame for all of this, comes out and I ask him, How much you get? —74 dollars. Not bad for a morning of redemption.   By then one of us has given up, the woman with streaked blonde hair and white wide leg polyester pants, and five or six more people have arrived, and finally I’m inside the inner sanctum of the place along with the guy who arrived just after me in the blue City of Bangor truck. The man doing the counting behind the counter finally finishes with the two guys in front of me and decides to take a break and disappears out back to who knows where, comes back five minutes later and gets a bottled water out of the tired fridge. He’s a big man wearing a Kiss t-shirt with the sleeves cut off. He’s had a few teeth pulled and a tattoo of a pine tree and a star–an image that might soon be the new flag of Maine. The guy behind me, City Truck Guy, says just under his breath, He’s a little off his game today. I empty my bags one by one on the beer soaked surface, trying not to look at what was inside the bags my daughter gave me and think instead of what other people have hidden in their bags, what might be the significance of water bottles and Bud Lights, which leads me back to my own trash, and where it came from, and why it felt important to stand here for almost an hour when I could have been swimming, just to pocket fifteen dollars and ten cents, and City Truck Guy looks around, says to me, I could put this in my next novel.   The Island in the Middle   By Meg Weston     Six-hundred-acre Crawford Pond   surrounds a 100 acre island.   Clementine colored peaked caps and sunflower yellow fringed hats   of magical mushrooms, and   slender white stems of Indian pipes I haven’t seen since childhood–   ghost plants silent on pine needle paths.     I’ve tiptoed back to a time   when the world was new,   every plant a discovery   every color saturated,   none to be taken for granted.     Ferns—green masses of them stretching   from tree to tree carpeting the forest floor—   I haven’t seen this many ferns since my mother   first showed me their delicate fronds, pinneated   petals extending from a central petiole—     she shared her love of them,   and mushrooms too—their   potent to satisfy hunger, or   power a poisoned demise.     Her shadow lingers in the woods as I walk   reminding me to to breathe in the scent   of pine and pitch, the freshness   of the lake. The wind picks up,   delaying our return, forcing the kayak   to fight the wind to remain in one place   a little longer, to linger,   to relish time.   Margaret A. Haberman lives and writes in Belfast, Maine. Her work has appeared in the Island Journal, the journal Spiritus, and Kerning. Her poems have also been selected for the Maine Public Radio program Poems from Here.  Meg Weston is the Founder, Director, and Host of The Poets Corner and co-founder/co-director of the Camden Festival of Poetry. In January 2020, Weston retired after 8 years as president of Maine Media College in Rockport, Maine. She previously held various leadership positions in the field of imaging, education, and journalism. Meg Weston’s poetry expresses a passion for geological processes that shape the earth and the stories that shape our lives. Her obsession with volcanoes can be seen in photographs on her website www.volcanoes.com. After receiving an MFA in Creative Writing in creative non-fiction from Lesley University in 2008, she began to focus on and study the craft of poetry. Her first poetry collection, Magma Intrusions, was published in May 2023 by Kelsay Books, and a new collaborative work with Margaret Haberman, To the Point and Back: Swimming Poems, was released in May 2024. Her poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies, and in a chapbook, Letters from the White Queen.  Margaret and Meg’s book To the Point and Back: Swimming Poems can be found on The Poets Corner website, in the “Shop.” Follow The Poets Corner on Instagram @ThePoetsCornerMaine and Facebook at: ThePoetsCorner  This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website or Simplecast podcast feed for more episodes. Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more and get in touch: poetrymedicineforthesoul.com