Anne Becker
THE BLESSING
It was hunger that brought us together,
first word we spoke to each other was lunch.
It was summer, a foreign country, we
stood at the threshold of adulthood, our
flesh moist, eager, our ignorant hearts danced
in our womanlike breasts. Out of the dirt,
from the floor of the castle keep, we rose
to eat what we gathered from the small shops
of the cathedral town. Crisp-crusted bread,
sharp-smooth cheese, globular tomatoes--red
cheeks, unblemished skin--tender petals
of pink meat. Everything we did we did
to music, talk music, the body's own
sostenuto when it loves color, buoyancy,
salt. We floated in a fever of laughter,
slept together nestled like dogs--all night--
and let the rain pour over us.
Anne Becker
Anne Becker's poems have appeared in Antioch Review, Southern Poetry
Review, Washington Jewish Week, Gargoyle, Washington Review, and
elsewhere. She earned an M.A. from the Writing Seminars, Johns Hopkins
University. She won the Maryland Heritage Poetry Award in 1984 and has
received a Fellowship in Poetry from the Maryland State Arts Council.
Her collection, The Transmutation Notebooks: Poems in the Voices of Charles and Emma Darwin
(Forest Woods Media, 1996) was completed with a MSAC work-in-progress
grant. Ms. Becker serves in the Maryland Poets-in-the-Schools program,
teaches creative writing at The Writer's Center in Bethesda, provides
poetry tutorials, and conducts a special poetry workshop, Writing the
Body, for those who have experience with life-threatening or chronic
illness. Following her interest in teaching across disciplines, she has
presented a workshop at the Corcoran School of Art on the use of
language for the visual artist, read and lectured at the University of
Connecticut for a course on the nature of scientific thought and at the
Corcoran for classes on the history of science and technology. For many
years, she served as Senior Producer of Watershed Tapes, which include
those of poets such as Ruth Stone, William Carlos Williams, Jean
Valentine, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky.
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