Maggie Smith

Maggie Smith (1977- ) born in Columbus, Ohio. She received a BA from Ohio Wesleyan and an MFA from Ohio State University. She is the author of Good Bones (Tupelo Press, 2017), named one of the Best Five Poetry Books of 2017 by the Washington Post and winner of the 2018 Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medal in Poetry. The title poem from this collection has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. 

Starlings

The starlings choose one piece of sky above the river

      and pour themselves in. Like a thousand arrows 

              pointing in unison one way, then another. That bit of blue

      doesn’t belong to them, and they don’t belong to the sky,

or to the earth. Isn’t that what you’ve been taught—nothing is ours?

      Haven’t you learned to keep the loosest possible hold?

              The small portion of sky boils with birds.

       Near the river’s edge, one birch has a knot so much

like an eye, you think it sees you. But of course it doesn’t.

— Maggie Smith