What Light: This Week’s Poem: Connie Wanek
Duluth's Connie Wanek is the author of "First Star," a What Light winning poem selected by poet Patricia Kirkpatrick.
First Star
Never tell anyone what you wished for
that fall evening. Die with that wish as you
lived with it. You grew around it,
like a sapling pruned back to one strong leader
by an amateur. He consulted a book
with drawings: Right. Wrong.
Then he looked up at you.
Each year buried the cut deeper.
Now, another northern summer:
a sunlit stone, windy shadows.
No or yes, or perhaps
from a distance they all look the same.
What changes is the question.
Every tree knows there are many ways
to enter the sky.
Poetics
I wrote First Star as a response to a weaving undertaken by Karen-Monson Thompson of Superior, Wisconsin. She works in a historical technique known as summer and winter weave. Her image included trees under an evening sky, with Venus high and bright the first star upon which we wish, earnestly and secretly, in autumn. I wanted the poem to be as mysterious and as clear as Venus in the half-dark. That could be what I wished for that fall evening.
Biography
Connie Wanek is the author of two books of poems: Bonfire (1997) and Hartley Field (2002). She also served as an editor of the anthology, To Sing Along the Way: Minnesota Women Poets from Pre-Territorial Days to the Present (2006), which has won several awards. Her third book of poems, On Speaking Terms, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2009. Ted Kooser named her a 2006 Witter Bynner Fellow of the Library of Congress. She lives in Duluth, Minnesota.
