Julie’s second collection of poems, Wing Over Wing, was published by Paraclete Press in October of 2019. It includes many of the poems featured on this website, including Turning. “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 near Burlington, Vermont. Her poems have been published widely in literary and religious journals, featured on The Writer’s Almanac, and included in anthologies, most recently in The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy. She was awarded a Vermont Council on the Arts grant for poetry in 2001. Her poem Milk won the 2015 Ruth Stone prize from Hunger Mountain Review. Julie’s poem Turning was nominated for the 2019 Pushcart Prize by the Potomac Review. You can read the poem below.

 

Turning

By Julie Cadwallader Staub

There comes a time in every fall
before the leaves begin to turn
when blackbirds group and flock and gather
choosing a tree, a branch, together
to click and call and chorus and clamor
announcing the season has come for travel.

Then comes a time when all those birds
without a sound or backward glance
pour from every branch and limb
into the air, as if on a whim
but it’s a dynamic, choreographed mass
a swoop, a swerve, a mystery, a dance

and now the tree stands breathless, amazed
at how it was chosen, how it was changed.

 

Communion

All through the short gray day
and long into the solitary night
the snow poured

from itself to itself
cascading through that wide acreage
between heaven and earth singing

          Hush
          Slow Down
          Stop.

When morning dawned to a sparkling infinity
of curves and curls of hip-high snow,
I snowshoed, almost floating, into the woods

the silence there
so profound
it became a third presence:

          the community of old growth hemlocks and white pines
          that extravagance of snow
          and this quiet so complete

the still place in me
recognized it
and bowed.

(published in Spiritus and nominated for a Pushcart Prize)
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