Poetry reading set for Friday

April is National Poetry Month and on Friday, the Youngstown State University Poetry Center will present a poetry reading by Etruscan Press poets H.L. Hix and William Heyen.The reading, part of the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts Distinguished Visitor Reading Series, is slated for 7 p.m. Friday in the Kilcawley Center's Art Gallery.

Hix has written four books of poetry and four books of criticism. His latest book from Etruscan is "Shadows of Houses." He is vice president for academic affairs at the Cleveland Institute of Art.

Heyen, the author of 17 books of poetry and five books of prose, most recently wrote "Shoah Train" for Etruscan. "Shoah Train," a collection of Holocaust themed poems, was a National Book Award finalist. He is an English professor and Poet in Residence Emeritus at SUNY Brockport.

In celebration of National Poetry Month, and in an attempt to do something a little different, the Jambar presents a poem each from Hix and Heyen:

Summer
By H.L. Hix

Suspended by a strand of spiderweb, seedburst
hovers and swings, counting out time, scribbling its sign
that this world is cursed with repletion, blessed with waste.
One wind shift, and light gray fence rails darken with rain.
God gets to assign meaning to the three gray cats
crouched at an open door looking out through the screen,
to round rocks clattering, to the fly that insists
on returning to my arm again and again.
Even dry months host a luxury of moonlight,
a sybaresis of dry leaves, of sprinkler spray
blown onto a neighbor's yard, of last plums picked at
by thirsty birds, paving stones tree roots lift and splay,
holes eaten into leaves at even intervals and straight,
sons following fathers, swinging their arms the same way.

Evidence
By William Heyen

Before the Nazis entered Warsaw,
Janina Bauman had to burn The Brown Book
which documented persecution of German Jews
in concentration camps. The book was bound
in hard dark cardboard. Always,

she'd remember how it hurt her fingers
to tear this evidence, which took a long time to burn,
but, page by photograph by page, did.
Then she cleaned out the stove, & spread
these ashes in her family's autumn garden.