Nancy Dymond is a third year member of New York’s Upper Delaware Writers Collective. She has been a participating poet in the Short Readings event sponsored by the Wayne County (PA) Arts Alliance for the past four years. In June of 2007 she resigned her editorship of Wayne County Arts Alliance’s newsletter, ArtsTalk, to concentrate on other creative endeavors.

In 1995 and 1996 during a post-divorce return to college to obtain a marketable skill (accounting), her poems “The Hand of O’Neill” and “For Lillie” won first and second prizes in the Alyssa Katon Writing Contest. One of Nancy’s poems, “Leaves Drying in the Son,” was included in a recent collaborative art exhibit at Marywood University in Scranton, PA. “The Way A Poem Lives” is featured in the online poetry journal Right Hand Pointing. In August several of her poems will be displayed at the Fireside Restaurant near Honesdale, PA, in a group show of word-related art.

Nancy continues to explore poetry through the monthly poetry workshops and special events of the UDWC, which was founded and is led by Mary Greene. Last winter the collective did a public reading of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood at NACL in Highland Lake, NY. Summer brought the group to Grey Towers in Milford, PA, for an outdoor reading of “tree poems.” September’s DIG-IT, the international digital film festival in Narrowsburg, NY, gave the poets an exciting opportunity to stir word concepts and visual contexts together with a digital ‘spoon’ into a set of pieces that play virtually on the theme of life in a small town.

that boy who climbed trees

that boy who climbed trees
delighted in the quick scramble up the trunk
rough bark or smooth 
the approach was the same
three steps and catapult to the lowest branch or
absent a lowest branch 
as high as he could get a good clamp 
for a determined shinny

his humus eyes sucked in the sky’s blue taunt
as with the quick movements of a squirrel
he swung, hung, grasped, jumped his way
to the highest branch that would hold his
jaybird’s weight

and sat in splendor looking out through leafy apertures
framing every cloud and bird and insect
a snapshot promenade for his kingly inspection

who can know what else that boy dreamed
as the trees planted their roots deep
in his firmament
he exhaled the soft breath of trees in summer
and sucked in the thrill of their stark
lifelessness in winter
celebrated the relentless return in the spring
of buds, blossoms, trickling sticky sap
when the leaves began to change color
it was because his birthday was approaching

no amount of science could explain that away
nor could he ever in his adult lifetime
be persuaded to believe a tree existed
for or by the simple mechanism of photosynthesis

instead uncurling within him grew
the possibility that these alluring arboreals
impeccable and impartial nurturers of life
stored the charged energy
of every moment of every day
collaged in electric space like insects in amber
a still life of vivid living
like that boy who climbed trees