Pages from Beverlee’s Journal

“Walden”

The pond
an early morning
impressionist’s dream.

Fog
fusing the edges of land into lake
trees into sky.

Quiet.

One lone bird sings
as rain drops cling to the tip
of a white pine fingerling.

Fog
saunters
across the pond.

The sun
burns,
illuminates the dream.

Henry
is
everywhere.

 

 

 

“Brooklyn Bridge”

YOU GOT THIS?  SPEND IT!

An angry black man with dreads
clutching dollar bills folded over,
one half
of one dollar
flutters in the wind
as he shakes his fist.

Met with derisive laughter.

A mad man yelling at a group of students
standing on the Bridge for a picture,
framed between lady liberty and the space where the towers once stood.

YOU GOT THIS?  SPEND IT.

Whitman would have questioned the source of anger
Legitimized the man and his city.

“Found Poem: Hawthorne on Thoreau”

“He is a keen and delicate observer of Nature . . . a genuine observer, which I suspect is almost as rare a character as even an original poet.  And Nature, in return for his love seems to adopt him as her special child, and show him secrets which few others are allowed to witness . . .”

“. . . a singular character; a young man with much of wild, original Nature still remaining in him; and so far as he is sophisticated, it is in a way and method of his own.”

 

 

 

Beverlee Prevost is an RBA student at Shepherd University.

“American Transcendentalism: An Online Travel Guide” was produced by students in ENGL 446, American Transcendentalism, and ENGL 447, American Literature and the Prominence of Place: A Travel Practicum. These courses were team-taught in the Department of English at Shepherd College (now Shepherd University), Shepherdstown, West Virginia, in Spring 2002 by Dr. Patricia Dwyer and Dr. Linda Tate. For more information on the course and the web project, visit “About This Site.” © 2003 Linda Tate.