I can handle a boat
better than any man—and when
I hear a call for help,
I pull my cape
around the shoulders
of my poplin dress, plunge
into rain, snow,
or gale’s swirl
in my battered skiff
to haul the nearly-drowned
across my stern,
struggle with them
through bristling surf
to the warmth
of my hip-roofed home.
Most laugh,
call me unwomanly,
and perhaps I am,
though Harper’s Daily
drew my portrait
for their cover, wrote,
None but a donkey
would call saving lives
unfeminine.
After 24 years working as a speech and language therapist in the public schools, Suellen
Wedmore retired to enter the MFA program in poetry at New England College. Now, Poet
Laureate emerita for the small town of Rockport, Massachusetts, she has been widely
published, with work appearing in Apalachee Review, The Chaffin Journal, Cimarron
Review, College English, Eclipse, Green Mountains Review, Harvard Review, The Ledge,
The Louisville Review, The MacGuffin, Manorborn, Oyez Review, Phoebe, Poem, and
many others. She was awarded first place in the Writer’s Digest rhyming
poetry contest and was an international winner in the 2006 Atlanta Review Poetry
Contest.
Wedmore’s chapbook Deployed was selected as winner of the Grayson Press
chapbook contest, and she was selected for a writing residency at Devil’s Tower,
Wyoming. In 2009, she was a winner in the Obama competition sponsored by New Millennium
Writings, and her chapbook On Marriage and Other Parallel Universes was
published by Finishing Line Press.