Kate Hanson Foster
The Sentinel
Crisis clings to the shelf
of my wings. In my many mirrors,
I parse danger from dangerous.
I fear the unknowns
in the understory to let you loose
in the open field. I know something
of starvation—the discipline
of suspicion and its endless hunger of hollows.
You might say I have lived too much,
the worry has done me in.
Don’t you see? What could be
is the monster. Buried in needles
of twilight—this dread, a moth pulse inside me.
About the writer:
Kate Hanson Foster’s first book of poems, Mid Drift, was published by Loom Press and was a finalist for the Massachusetts Center for the Book Award in 2011. Her work has appeared in Birmingham Poetry Review, Comstock Review, Harpur Palate, Poet Lore, Salamander, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She was recently awarded the NEA Parent Fellowship through the Vermont Studio Center. She lives and writes in Groton, Massachusetts.
Image: Crow on a Snowy Branch by Ohara Koson (1877-1945). Scan of a book page. 1910. Public domain.
