Lorraine Henrie Lins
2010 Poet Laureate
Lorraine Henrie Lins is a Pennsylvania county Poet Laureate and author of four books of poetry: All the Stars Blown to One Side of The Sky, I Called It Swimming, Delaying Balance and most recently, 100 Tipton. She serves as the Director of New and Emerging Poets with Tekpoet and is a founding member of the “No River Twice” improvisational poetry troupe. Lins’ work appears in wide variety of familiar publications and collections, as well as on a small graffiti poster in New Zealand. Born and raised in the suburbs of Central New Jersey, the self-professed Jersey Girl now resides along the coast of North Carolina.
Why She Keeps the Recipe
It’s what’s left—
left to learn, left to share
in the canonized nuances of “how”
despite the incalculable ways
all the other mothers
showed all the other daughters—
it’s what’s left, what’s hers.
In the parchment melody
of her mother’s voice,
in the breath between folds
in the fingers, piano-long
rolling dough that was the flour
that was the wheat that was the seed
that was lost in dark rich soil,
and hungered for sunlight,
was quenched by rain, and sprouted
primitive-limbed growth entrusted
to unforgivable thorns
and pale green possibilities
that bore tight, succulent berries
against the spidering branches
left to sag under the heft of ripeness
onto her father’s open hand,
his calloused thumb, rolling
one dense berry, the color of midnight
in his palm—
because it’s what’s left,
the details that can no longer be
but only be spoken of.