The Dangerous Lesson of the Peach

The Dangerous Lesson of the Peach

Do you have a memory of peaches
of the child whose small teeth sank
deep into the golden flesh, spreading
surprise behind her eyes how the juice
filled her mouth and her heart with hope
the endless possibility in the peach
and the innocent belief in all peaches ever after
as if this was the moment against which
her life should be measured?

“Poetry is everything to me,” Lisa Meckel often says. She believes it holds hope in its heart and meaning in its hand that we may live out the truths of being alive. She remembers how the joyful jingles and the rhymes and rhythms of childhood poetry brought her immense pleasure as a child. So much so, she tried to pencil out her own poems. “Bertram and the Dancing Bear,” one of the poems she wrote, even earned a dollar. Her mother had submitted it to a magazine and it won the first prize. Her mother clipped the dollar to the magazine and saved it for years. One day, she presented it to Lisa as an encouragement, saying, “See what you could do when you were five. Imagine what you can do now!”

Lisa lives in an area where Robinson Jeffers lived. She believes his poetry and presence has greatly influenced her. She has been a three-time winner of the Poetry Award at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference as well as a presenter for the Big Read honoring Robinson Jeffers. Currently, she is assembling a collection of her poems for publication.