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.”
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