Julie Cadwallader-Staub lives near Burlington, Vermont. Her poems have been published in numerous journals and featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. Her first collection of poems, Face to Face, was published by Cascadia Publishing House in June 2010. Sales continue to be strong. Read reviews at Amazon.com and add your own! You can purchase Face to Face on either Cascadia’s website or Amazon. Joy and Guinea Pig which Garrison Keillor read on The Writer’s Almanac, are in this collection, in addition to sixty other poems.

NEW!

Garrison Keillor’s new book, Good Poems: American Places includes Julie’s poem Reverence. If Life Were Like Touch Football, one of the poems in Face to Face was featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac on October 12, 2011.

REVERENCE

By Julie Cadwallader-Staub

The air vibrated
with the sound of cicadas
on those hot Missouri nights after sundown
when the grown-ups gathered on the wide back lawn,
sank into their slung-back canvas chairs
tall glasses of iced tea beading in the heat

and we sisters chased fireflies
reaching for them in the dark
admiring their compact black bodies
their orange stripes and seeking antennas
as they crawled to our fingertips
and clicked open into the night air.

In all the days and years that have followed,
I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced
that same utter certainty of the goodness of life
that was as palpable
as the sound of the cicadas on those nights:

my sisters running around with me in the dark,
the murmur of the grown-ups’ voices,
the way reverence mixes with amazement
to see such a small body
emit so much light.