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TVBC
“Myrna
Stone’s poems are filled with grace and wonder. They are strong,
and unsentimental, and deeply moving.”
—Thomas Lux
“Recklessly formal and
daringly casual, Myrna Stone’s poems set page after page aglow
with amplitude of feeling and vibrancy of detail.”
—Jeff Gundy
MYRNA STONE’s poems have appeared in
Poetry, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, Boston
Review, Quarterly West, Nimrod, Barrow
Street, and other journals, as well as in three anthologies:
Flora Poetica: The Chatto Book of Botanical Verse (Chatto &
Windus, 2001)
I Have My Own Song for It: Modern Poems of Ohio (University of Akron Press, 2002) and
O Taste and See: Food Poems (Bottom Dog Press, 2003). Two of her poems,
“Less and More” and “From the House of Blue Lights,”
received the 2002 Dr. O. Marvin Lewis Poetry Award from Weber Studies. She is the recipient of two Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowships in Poetry, and a Full Fellowship to Vermont Studio Center. Her first full-length collection,
The Art of Loss, was released by Michigan State University Press in 2001 and earned for her the 2001 Ohio Poet of the Year
Award.
Click Here
to learn more
about The Art of Loss.
The
Lost Boy
/ Myrna Stone
I’m thinking
now of Benny,
not as
he is today—graying and fatter
than
he should be, his inconsolable heart
confining him to
his sister’s
front room in winter, her back porch
in
summer—but of what he was, apparitional
on his second-hand Schwinn,
a primer of
grimaces, of churlish words
and
warnings, the bearer of ominous tidings
on the state of
sinners’ souls.
For the pennies from your pocket
he
would sell you rocks from the Stillwater,
walnuts from your
neighbor’s trees,
your own
garden shears, then pedal
away
without a word, the
rosary on his neck
beating time
against his chest.
By day he kept a set route up and down
the
street, by night a vigil at our churchyard
grotto. Ask him
what he heard
or saw,
kneeling at the iron railing
in rapt silence for hours until
his mother called
him home, until the grotto’s
concrete shell shattered beneath
the wrecker’s ball. Ask what
grave secrets
spoke to him from
the Virgin’s
granite tongue, from the painted lips
of the peasant child,
or what, precisely,
he fathomed in
the darkness
beyond the light
from the candle’s
tinted
glass, in his own incessantly swaying
head. Ask what message
Our Mother of All
Sorrows, hidden
in
her little grove of tiger lilies at the edge
of
his sister’s yard,
whispers
to him now, what
news of the world
beyond the world,
what alarm, what loss.
—TVBR Issue #17: Vol.
VII, No. 1—Ohio
History
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