Poem of the Week

Ruth Stone (1915–2011) was the author of thirteen poetry collections and the recipient of many awards, including the National Book Award, which she won at the age of eighty-seven for In the Next Galaxy. Her unusual story of personal struggle and belated acclaim was dominated by her husband’s suicide in 1959. Stone went on to raise three daughters and considered her work “love poems, all written to a dead man.” She taught in universities around the country, including SUNY–Binghamton. For more than fifty years she lived and wrote in her farmhouse in Goshen, Vermont.

Eve, Also

by Ruth Stone

Holding in my left hand an apple;
they told me it was naturally grown.
No sprays. Or if sprayed,
the spray’s not as deadly as some;
the skin, red as a Vermont
sunset in late summer,
when something, insects, pollution,
thickens the lower layers of air

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