A Poem by Donna Spector

Stratford from the Avon

     -- a photograph by Irene Miller

Fog on the river, ice below.
Black branches flare,
recede into mist.  Orange street
lamps light the lonely
woman in her red coat.  She has
nowhere to go, wanders
over rivers, back and forth,
the way I drive by
graveyards, calling greetings,
consolations, to people
I don't know.

Look!  A church steeple rises
faintly into a gray sky,
its spire, topped by a cross,
tries to touch some meaning,
something universal,
a greeting or a consolation.

Donna Spector is a playwright as well as a fiction writer and poet.  Her plays have appeared Off Broadway, regionally and in Canada, Ireland and Greece.  Her play Golden Ladder was published in Women Playwrights:  The Best Plays of 2002.  Winner of the Masters Poetry Prize and member of Dramatists Guild and Poets & Writers, she received two National Endowment for the Humanities grants to study in Greece.  A program of her aired on Australian national radio, and her poems, plays, stories and monologues have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies, including The Greensboro Review, Poet & Critic, Sycamore Review, Gaia, Notre Dame Review, Parabola, Rattle, The Connecticut River Review, The Pedestal Magazine, The Paterson Literary Review and American Life in Poetry.  The Woman Who Married Herself, a Sinclair Poetry Prize finalist, was published in 2010 by Evening Street Press, and she is now an associate editor of that press.