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Write On Magazine's Featured Poet

Lorraine Geiger

Poet from Sebring, Florida

North of the Everglades
By Lorraine Geiger

Today, we are out on the river again. We climb into the airboat ready with binoculars and airplugs. The surge of the propellers down the tall, pale grasses near the landing ramp sending whirls of insects into wilted air. This part of the river is shallow and narrow and snakes through swampland like a ragged ribbon, edges worn by wind and man. A Great Blue Heron sweeps along just above the treeline, dinner deep in its bill. Up ahead, a circular ripple echoes silently wider, its creator diving to safety. A corridor of sawgrass towers above us like highrises. At intervals, evidences of airboats having folded it into a soggy mass of grass and river. Rounding a bend, I glimpse a snapping turtle just as it flees the rush of our boat. White-plumbed egrets flutter through brush rising above our noisy craft, but never truly escaping it. A confused alligator hatchling joins its clutch as it is pushed under by flat bottomed fiberglass. And there in the distance, high on the branch of a withered pine, balances a lone bald eagle. The drone of our motor drowns out the natural sounds that abound here. Yet, far off in the mist of this ancient swamp I feel I can hear the murmur of the last dinosaur. Third Place Category 20 FSPA State Contest 1996 © 1996 copyright Lorraine Geiger

 

Flight at the Top of the World
By Lorraine Geiger

We fly over desolate marshlands as a transient moon swims beneath our fragile wings. Drifting clouds swallow us incessantly each in turn spewing us back into the clear wilderness air. Far off in the blackness of the Northern sky an airport beacon flashed blue assurances. The tundra below seems oblivious to our humming motor and the meld of metal and minds that trails behind it. I can feel a thousand eyes watch from the marshes below. And always the moon slipping across the vacillating water then hiding itself in arise of brush and wasteland. Isolated in this space where moon and earth devour inner strengths I feel I am at the mercy mechanical wings and unseen forces. And I sense the urgency in the blue light that beacons. First Place Category 34 NFSPS National Contest 1991 © 1991 copyright Lorraine Geiger

 

Market Day Beneath North Bay Mountain
By Lorraine Geiger

Clouds have fallen again settling in the valley dampening cabbages and worn red barns. Uncle is talking of mortgages and crop loss. Auntie is staring into the chipped cup, her wind-blown face absorbing his words like the hail that fell last August. But I think only of the trip down the mountain. We always stop for ice-cream. The road is narrow and potholes trip our words, forcing us into jarred laughter. We curve sharply into the village. Solid rock rises on the right as menacing as January. Two breaths to the left the cliff sheers downward into clear bay waters. The adults are deep in their bartering and whose barn roof needs fixing again. But I am free to dream of leaping into haystacks, chanting to soft-horned snails, and slipping my tongue over dripping ice-cream. Here in this place where people chain their houses to the hillsides. First Place Category 2 FSPA State Contest 1991 © 1991 copyright Lorraine Geiger

 

Flint Hill 1949
By Lorraine Geiger

Crimson from the evening sun threatens the mountain rushes through vermilion curtains and settles warm upon the cold steel of my old Singer. From deep in the slumber of gray oaks comes a pleading cry. It is repeated and repeated again. Do you remember that day walking home past the road to Eagle Mountain late afternoon sun blasting, slanted through white birches our long shadows dancing and third grade Readers nipping at our heels from the ends of tattered leather straps? Remember Billy, sneaking up behind us his face grinning, sly and merciless as he pushed us both giggling into a bank of snow? You nod. I pull the black thread through the slender needle sharp as memories tying a knot at one end. Remember how Billy's sister glared at him with those steel green eyes of hers as cold snow melted down our warm necks? How he pulled me up by the strap on back of my woolen coat tearing loose one of the wooden buttons? Was it Amelia who told us how their father had taken Billy's hand had plunged it trembling into the punishing flames of the blazing wood stove? How his desperate cries had ravaged the house piercing deep into the stillness of the mountain? I push the throbbing needle through scarlet velvet as the dying sun buries itself somewhere in the mountain. You slowly close the window above my sewing basket and settle in the chair beside me. We listen for the muffled cry from the slumbering gray oaks as I plunge the sharp needle deep into button and fabric fastening them in their place forever. First place Category 4 FSPA State Contest 1993 © 1993 copyright Lorraine Geiger

About the poet . . .

Lorraine Geiger moved to Florida from Newfoundland in 1966 after her marriage to an American serviceman. She had become interested in poetry in grade school and continued her interest through college. During her child-raising years she began integrating her poetry into stories in a series of ten children's books, which as yet have not been submitted to a publisher. She has had her poetry represented in 12 state anthologies as well as in the 1991 edition of Prize Winning Poems of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. She has won many other prizes at the state and national level. Geiger lives in Sebring, Florida, where she and her husband operate a small manufacturing firm producing exotic leather products. Having owned an alligator farm with as many as 5,000 alligators, these animals are the subject of many of her poems.

 

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