28
2017
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
FINALIST, 2016 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE BY SUSAN SCHMIDT
1970/1670
Wistful I climb to the sun above mist and fog. When I was young I would stride straight uphill to the clouds. I pause in the wind and look out to sea. On my twenty-first I climbed Snowdon three hundred years after my ancestor left Northern Wales. The mountain’s copper, coal profit lies underground but I could never work in the dark. The summit to me means being closer to the sky. Descending I traverse steep bluebell slopes as I read slant-slab orogeny. Layer-cake rocks speak Welsh named after ancient tribes – Cambrian Ordovician Silurian.
SUSAN SCHMIDT works as a freelance developmental editor, polishing science and history books, novels, and memoirs. She has an MS in Environmental Science, an MA in British literature, and a PhD in American literature, with postdoctoral studies in bioethics and conflict resolution. She has worked as a professor of literature, sailboat captain, and science-policy analyst. She is a contra-dance caller, bass fiddler, and gardener. Her homeplace is the Chesapeake Bay, and her homeport is Beaufort, NC, where she walks beaches with her Boykin Spaniel. In 2006, Johns Hopkins University Press published her narrative nonfiction, ecological history book, Landfall Along the Chesapeake: In the Wake of Captain John Smith. She has won the Guy Smith Poetry Prize, and her poems are included in Literary Trails of Eastern North Carolina (University of North Carolina Press, 2013). In 2015, Kakapo Press published her novel Song of Moving Water and poetry collection Salt Runs in My Blood. Read another of her poems selected as a finalist for the James Applewhite Poetry Prize in the 2017 print issue.