Poems by Linda Benninghoff

Linda has been published most recently in Oranges and Sardines and Agenda. She has published five chapbooks, one of them winning a prize at Kritya, in India. She is assistant poetry editor at Women Writers. She graduated with honors from Johns Hopkins University where she was an English major. She has an MA in English with an emphasis on creative writing from Stony Brook.


Storm

How many summers
Will I wait
To find you again?

I have to have
Blunt nerves
To withstand
Your seeming
Always to rise up again,
And return.
The silence
Swollen
By our
Waiting voices.



Dawn

For nights
I have not slept
Only to be startled by
The peace of a catbird’s
Many-pronged song.

The blonde grasses
Rehearse the spells of summer.
Torn, I lay between them,
I hear sounds
Crisp as the bell my pet
Once rang.


Where Are the Tears of the World? After Roethke

The fox envelops his part of the field.
I have waited here,
Worn out as I always am,
Hoping to glimpse him.
And then I do
And he moves smoothly,
Like water flowing.