During 2025, Julie’s poem The Heart won an Honorable Mention in Passager’s national contest, her poem Orchid won third place in the Muriel Craft Bailey contest with the Comstock Review, and her poem The Heart is Wider Than the Sky was published by Spiritus. The poems are below–enjoy!
Her second collection of poems, Wing Over Wing, was published in 2019. “This book is a treasure,” writes Parker Palmer, “the work of a poet who time and again has opened my eyes to my own life and the life of the world.” Jay Parini describes the book: “These poems unfold with a rich, deep music. The poet inclines her ear to the mysteries, and she finds them everywhere, in the least expected places.” You can order Wing Over Wing from the publisher, from your local bookstore, or from Amazon. Julie’s first collection of poems, Face to Face, was published by Cascadia Publishing House in June 2010. You can purchase Face to Face on Cascadia’s website, your local book store, or on Amazon.
Julie Cadwallader Staub lives in the St. Croix Valley near Stillwater, Minnesota. Her poems have been published widely in literary and religious journals, featured on The Writer’s Almanac, nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and included in anthologies. She was the 2023 artist in residence at the St. Croix Watershed Research Station’s Pine Needles program, a collaboration with the Minnesota Science Museum.
The Heart
By Julie Cadwallader Staub
The heart keeps up its cadence despite Uvalde, Ukraine,
Buffalo, Parkland, Columbine, Sandy Hook.
Its pumping persists when George, Sandra, Emmett, Michael,
Breonna, Trayvon, Carol, Tyre are murdered.
After Pulse; after residential schools and reservations;
after my own mother, father, nephew, husband, and now Joan,
still it perseveres. How can the heart hold this multiplicity of sorrows
and still ripple with delight when the hermit thrush sings?
when the baby chortles? when the arms go round?
The heart is a hollow muscle, yes, filling and emptying,
filling and emptying, but it is also a tender engine, with chambers and valves
connected so securely to one another
they open for grief, they open for joy.
The mind is wider than the sky
By Julie Cadwallader Staub
— inspired by Emily Dickinson’s #126: The Brain—is wider than the Sky—
The mind is wider than the sky
—it harbors no horizon—
the mind can circle round the globe
and find where mercy rises.
The heart is deep as space is deep
—the way that sorrow expands—
still joy appears, we know not how,
to visit its native land.
The spirit moves of its own accord
—it doesn’t depend on words—
but lights and lifts and disappears
a butterfly, a bird.
Orchid
By Julie Cadwallader Staub
— A rare orchid, thought to be extinct in Vermont, rediscovered (Vermont Public, June 8th, 2022)
She looks like nothing
as much as a ballerina
her elegance perfectly caught
in stem, leaves, flower
delicate arms twine
around her own blossom
embracing herself
as if she, too
were relieved
that she had not disappeared
from these woods
forever
but here she is
illuminated in a patch of sunlight
amidst beech and birch, maple and oak
a self-pollinator, holding thousands of tiny seeds
and all we need to do
is protect the stage upon which
her performance depends
and she will do the rest
her stage, this forest floor undisturbed
and beneath it
the network of fungi
essential to the small whorled pogonia
and the small whorled pogonia
essential to the whole world.
