Ruth Stone

A quick thought: Watching all the forest fires burning in Canada; the smoke remnants rising up and dispersing to the heavens like lost souls.

Today we note the birth date of award-winning American poet Ruth Stone (June 8, 1915 – November 19, 2011).

Stone’s second marriage was to professor and poet Walter Stone in 1944, with whom she had two daughters. Walter Stone committed suicide in 1959; this tragedy shaped the path of Ruth Stone's life as she sought ways to support herself and her daughters by teaching poetry at universities across the United States.

Her work is distinguished by its tendency to draw imagery and language from the natural sciences. Stone died at her home in Goshen, Vermont, on November 19, 2011. She was buried near the raspberry bushes behind her Goshen home.

Stone's verse was published widely in periodicals, and she was the author of thirteen books of poetry.

This Strangeness In My Life

It is so hard to see where it is,
but it is there even in the morning
when the miracle of shapes
assemble and become familiar,
but not quite; and the echo
of a voice, now changed,
utterly dissociated, as though
all warmth and shared sweetness
had never been. It is this alien
space, not stark as the moon,
but lush and almost identical
to the space that was. But it is not.
It is another place and you are not
what you were but as though emerging
from the air, you slowly show yourself
as someone else, not ever remembered.

--Ruth Stone