On the Maine Islands

No one will see

The light-stepping deer

When they come out from the alders

To look for windfalls

In the abandoned orchard.

No one will see the daylilies

The color of red foxes,

Waist-high coarse-textured lilies

That spring from the tumbled stones

Where there was once a farmhouse

And crowd around the cellar-hole

Now thick with raspberry-canes

Where hornets forage.

Mink live here, and voles,

There are seals on the offshore ledges

And herons with their harsh cries

Are nesting up in the woods,

But the man who was down by the shore

Scraping the hull of a boat

The woman feeding her hens

The child playing with fir-cones

Have been gone for a hundred years

And in the still harbor

There is no skiff but ours.

*          *          *

These granite and limestone islands,

These tops of flooded mountains

Are scattered all over the bay

Their clearings shining with wildflowers,

The live coals of hawkweed,

The daisies’ fiery white,

And finespun birdsongs shiver

Over their scraps of forest.

They’re moated with ice-cold channels

Deep enough for a whale,

Where once or twice a summer

With a slow throb of engines

The Swedish freighters go by.

When the sun comes out

The sky speaks blue

And the whole bay

Down to its least cove

Takes on a dazzle of blue,

Becomes a field of splendor.

*          *          *

High up over the harbor

Of the fishing village

On another island

Is St. Mary Star of the Sea,

Built by Italian stonecutters

Who came to work in the quarries

It’s a white frame building

The size of a one-room schoolhouse,

With six milky windows

And a low spire.

Below are the steep-pitched streets

And the fishermen’s wooden houses

With their stacks of lobster pots

Their granite garden walls

And their small gardens flaming

In the short northern summer.

Through St. Mary’s windows

Half open in the summer

We can see the harbor,

The water bluer than larkspur,

The sloping folds of granite.

An old Italian woman

Who gets to Mass early

Has come with dahlias and roses

And the stonecutters’ grandchildren

Carefully chant the Gloria

In their transparent voices

For the one who carved the islands

Has come to live among us,

And this is the house he has chosen,

St. Mary’s Star of the Sea.

--Anne Porter (1911-2011) from Living Things: Collected Poems (2006)