Daniel Lusk
Daniel Lusk is author of eight poetry collections and other books, most recently Every Slow Thing, poetry (Kelsay Books 2022) and Farthings, eBook (Yavanika Press 2022). Well-known for his teaching and widely published in literary journals, his genre-bending essay, “Bomb” (New Letters) was awarded a Pushcart Prize. Native of the prairie Midwest and a former commentator on books for NPR, Daniel is a Senior Lecturer of English Emeritus at the University of Vermont. Poetry News
This poem appears in the Summer 2025 issue of The Hemlock Journal.
Salut d’Amour
—Listening to a tune by Richard Elgar,
Colin Firth on piano from the film Supernova.
Winter morning. Old Poet daydreams:
stolen moments in a borrowed boat.
There was a smell of absinthe, cigars
and oysters.
He scatters sand and ashes on the cliff-side
track …
A time to wonder, to sing, to sympathize
with sorrows of the hooligans and whores.
To recall The Martyrdom of the Carmelites,
an open-air theater in Virginia, audience
arrayed in next to nothing…
a grassy slope, summer of pretense.
Or was it Hamlet in New Jersey?
And what of Ophelia’s warmed-over tears?
Irresistible, tune-salad outbursts
of a winter wren, a savant…
It might as well be spring…
What poem does owl whisper
to unwitting creatures under the snow?
Were we lovers?
