Patricia Gray Poet and Writer
"To the Late-Blooming Student"
(You can find this poem below.)
Hello and Welcome
The news here is that four of my poems are now in Mediterranean Poetry. Please see the link below.
In 2023 I enjoyed an Artist Fellowship from from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and I'm looking forward to getting some new poems published this year. Please look around, follow the links to my poems, articles or blogs. Would love to have your comments as I develop this site!
The view on the left is one I enjoyed every day while growing up in the Shenandoah Valley.
Patricia's Bio
Patricia Gray is the author of Rupture: Poems from Red Hen Press, plus blogs, articles and stories, several of which you can read using links on this site. She will be teaching a Zoom workshop, "Inspiration Station," for The Writer's Center on February 4, 2024. She was a finalist for the 55th Millennium Writers Award in 2023 for her poem "Morning of Wilderness and Wind."
Patricia’s MFA in Creative Writing is from the University of Virginia where she studied poetry and fiction. She formerly headed the Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress and served three years as a judge for the Poetry Out Loud competition at the national level. Her poems have been anthologized most recently in Still Me from Wolf Ridge Press and in Endlessly Rocking celebrating Walt Whitman. She attended Bread Loaf Writers Conference twice as a selected participant and has directed a Dylan Thomas play with 18 actors playing 60 parts.
To the Late-Blooming Student
That journal I asked you to write
doesn't have to be “literature."
Forget grammar. Crack the door.
Let the small self creep out--the part
that got shunted aside while you wrote
memos in offices, pursued your career,
or just picked up the car from the shop.
Let your writing stand up and strut on the page.
Flesh it out. Let it laugh and talk. Give me
the chloroformed cloth you clasped
over its mouth till it slumped in the corner.
No one deserves to be treated that way.
--Patricia Gray
This poem first appeared in Pudding magazine.
A Harbor Town
A woman so thin she barely casts a shadow
shows up dressed in black and white at the water’s edge.
Waves crash, spill on sand and wash near
a man and woman kissing on the beach.
A blue-boned moon settles into the sea of clouds.
In town, a woman’s lonely son leaves home.
The book he left open on the kitchen table cries out,
as an empty boat rocks, pitches, near the pier.
The boy does not come home.
From behind a shuttered window, the village widow
watches the boy’s mother come and go. Ladies
from church no longer stop at her house for tea.
The mail carrier either sprained his ankle
or refuses to climb steps to her porch.
Down the street, the owner of the garden shop
withdraws an order for fall bulbs and mulch.
A neighbor who knew the missing youngster locks
her small son in the garage; throws the phone and strikes
her husband’s head. Whatever the day wanted left early.
Smudged, the sun hides in a soft bruise of clouds. Buoys
bob and tilt in gray water, while the ferry’s wheel turns away.
Tourists become disenchanted and vow not to return. At the dock,
the woman in black and white goes northward. Why she came here
is uncertain. Why she leaves without speaking, no one knows.
--Patricia Gray
This poem appeared in the May 2023 issue of Beyond Words Literary Magazine in answer to their "theme challenger" for poems about strangers.