Former Bucksport poet laureate pens ode to Henry Wadsworth-Longfellow
‘Because we grew up memorizing him, did you?’
By Patricia Ranzoni
Patricia Ranzoni, Bucksport’s poet laureate from 2011 to 2024. Photo courtesy of Patrica Ranzoni.
Wherever you are, tuned to the BBC, your radio
bringing you “soulscape poetry,” I have an epiphany for you.
'Twas a grand holiday gift, that Longfellow House tour near
where our daughter works, home in Maine.To see on old maps
how close to the shore it was, stretching from what became
Congress Street, bustling, to the Back Cove back then ‘til
Portland filled in. One of the oldest places on the peninsula
today, from seventeen hundred something.
I can't show you everything that made me cry, wherever
in the world you are, but this much I will try: The room
from which, through flooding panes, he gazed in tidal grief
out over their garden and penned, “Into each life some rain
must fall…,” Mrs. Longfellow's blue-marbled table bowl
of far-fetched lemons, in spite of it all, which I shall copy
for us old and new years to come, nestled with greens.
An inspired curator's scarlet scarf unfurling his stature out
over Longfellow Square, a tier of snow-white gifts tied with
shiny red ribbons glorifying his patinaed lap, celebrating that
he, in his own right, is the present. “Elegant” as my stately
father would recite from his Canadian mother and the eight
grades of schooling he earned upriver in that one room on
Pickle Ridge, Webster Plantation, beyond Lincoln, before
leaving for the woods, then, driving that ax, World War Two.
Because you, Dear Listener, wherever you are, could go out
into your own town center right now and touch someone
who could recite him still. What else can you show me? Tell?
—Ranzoni was Bucksport’s poet laureate from 2014 to 2025.
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