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ONLINE BOOKSTORE FEATURED TITLES
Songs of Earth and Light
Richesses: Francophone Songwriter Poets
Munster Literature Centre
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Eric Paul Shaffer is author of five books of poetry, including Lahaina Noon; Living at the Monastery, Working in the Kitchen; Portable Planet; RattleSnake Rider and Kindling: Poems from Two Poets. His poetry appears in more than two hundred and fifty local, national and international reviews and in the anthologies The Soul Unearthed and 100 Poets Against the War. Shaffer received the 2002 Elliot Cades Award for Literature and a 2006 Ka Palapala Po'okela Book Award for Lahaina Noon. He won a 2006 fellowship to the Summer Fishtrap Writers Workshop and Retreat in Oregon. Burn & Learn, his first novel, will be published in Autumn 2009. He teaches at Honolulu Community College.
A Small Gathering of Light The sun has yet to rise, but the silver sky has extinguished
the stars. Haleakala is black against the rising light.
Maybe someone should say the mountain before dawn is darker than the mountain at midnight under starlight. It is. Last night, stars hovered at my fingertips. If there is fire, it is beyond me. On one side of the sky, Venus blazed
near Castor and Pollux. On the other, Jupiter brooded
over the volcano. If light creates distance,
then darkness draws us together. On nights when Venus is on my right hand, and Jupiter on my left, I can't imagine the world going on without me, but I am confident. It will. With three nights yet to fill, the bold moon displays the face
of change to us, journeying between the light
and its reflection. This morning, a single star shone to mark
our direction. There is only a small gathering of light,
but with the mountain as a guide, any road through day will do.
©2009 Eric Paul Shaffer
Author Links Lahaina Noon at Leaping Dog Press Nine Irreverent Poems from the Monastery Kitchen (selected poems by Shaffer) Poem by Shaffer in Ploughshares
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©2009 Southword Editions and Munster Literature Centre |
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