Jennifer Myers of Dracut, Mass., late yesterday posted on her Facebook page a photograph of a fabulous sunset in Lowell, Mass. Her picture made me think of this poem I wrote in the late 1980s. The speaker in the poem is in a car in the middle of the O’Donnell Bridge (Mammoth Road/School Street bridge) and looking upriver into the western sky. I was fortunate enough to have the poem published in Beat Scene magazine in Coventry, England, and then reprinted in a small pamphlet of poems that I released in 1995 called Hit Singles.
Big Sky Country
A painter said Lowell has wonderful skies.
Crimson smear, fronds of gold westerly,
Pigment squeezed out and runny.
My viewpoint is mid-bridge in traffic—
The skinny winter no competition
For minutes of imported pleasure.
A slow quake up high.
Fissured acres of cobalt, scarlet, purple.
In one sound the vehicles accelerate:
Amen.
—Paul Marion (c) 2019