Stone Soup Servings is a regular series for Oddball Magazine that features upcoming performers at Stone Soup Poetry, the long-running spoken word venue in the Boston area that has recently partnered with Oddball Magazine. Stone Soup Poetry meets from 8-10 p.m. every Monday at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery at 106 Prospect Street with an open mike sign-up at 7:30 p.m.

On May 5th, we celebrate Stone Soup’s 43rd year as a Boston area poetry venue. Tonight, we are privileged to have the return of Salem author Dennis Daly and a Stone Soup first for visiting poet Dimitris Lyacos. We weren’t able to contact Dimitris in time and hope to publish him in a later post this week. Until then, enjoy an excerpt from Dennis’ newest collection, Nightwalking with Nathaniel.

 

Great Misery Island

Coiling white caps brace the grayness
The salt sea shrieks and shrieks again
Against the unchanging, anxious
Sky-vault, a lone and sorry man

On this island promontory;
Nearby the skeletons of ships
Sliding under, bones bleached—a jury
Of pernicious peers comes to grips

With its fate. Oak and maple groves
Offer light solace at dead end
Of each path above the curled coves,
Sanctuary from foe and friend.

This fractured heart with shaky hand,
Squeezing the soft wasted hour,
Searches out the limn of coastland
From lighthouse to sooty tower.

Then in darkness he descends down
Into his purgatory’s void,
An unmodified man, a noun
Exposed to weather, unemployed

Until dawn, when he’ll start to climb
Terrace after terrace. His pride
Peeled off: uncloaked, unreasoned crime
Bared to all. A lover shanghaied

By love. Beyond the breakwater
Of fate and sting of smaller hurts
Still his hopes persist; he totters
On and on, confounding the experts.