Delmarva Review: Thanksgiving by Meredith Davies Hadaway

Delmarva Review: Thanksgiving by Meredith Davies Hadaway

Author’s Note:  It’s pretty quiet right now on the Chester River. We’ve pulled our boats and turned our gardens under. Now gray skies and bare trees come alive with the migratory birds that are my favorite Fall visitors. This poem is just to say, even with the disruption and the uncertainty of this season, I am grateful for all that remains.

Thanksgiving

Because I wake up here where a kingfisher flits
to a piling, where the heron strides his patient

watch, and a sparrow chips away at the feeder.

Birds go about their business, the winged
body of one soul, lodged briefly 

in another, stitching clouds to the tide. 

From somewhere a shotgun stutters. One goose
Tumbles—skims the edge of soft 

and familiar. No wind, no sound beyond
my own breathing. Just a thick, hovering 

sky. The bare limbs hold it
between them. 

Meredith Davies Hadaway has been a featured writer in Delmarva Review. She is the author of three poetry collections: Fishing Secrets of the Dead, The River is a Reason, and At The Narrows (winner of the 2015 Delmarva Book Prize for Creative Writing). She holds an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Hadaway is a former Rose O’Neill Writer- in-Residence and chief marketing officer at Washington College.

Photography by Wilson Wyatt

Delmarva Review is an independent literary journal publishing the best of new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions nationwide, and beyond. It’s thirteenth annual edition was released this month. It receives partial financial support from individual tax-deductible contributions and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. The review is available from Amazon.com and specialty booksellers like Mystery Loves Company, in Oxford. For more information, see the website: www.DelmarvaReview.org.