Joanne Hayes is the Poet Laureate of Greenfield Community College. That’s unofficial, of course, but the poems published here should convince a reader that she deserves the title, and the crown of laurel.
The U. S. has an official Poet Laureate, whose major responsibility is to promote the life and liveliness of poetry in America. But traditionally, a poet laureate wrote official poems honoring those in the higher echelons of a nation’s power. Joanne Hayes’ poems honor people at Greenfield Community College who have given their energies to the academic, cultural, and social lives of the community.
Some of her poems celebrate transitions from one kind of life to another, as in graduations, weddings, even retirements. So we have “Grandmother’s Treadle,” read at the June 2016 graduation, and dedicated to Bob Pura, who was also retiring as President of the College. We can feel and hear the treadle being worked, honoring both Bob Pura’s service to the College, and by extension his grandmother’s work:
Her feet flew across the years,
click-clack of pedal on metal rungs
her thin back taut – muscles sewing thread –
hair tightly piled –
one braid, two braids pulled against
her neck, then coiled.
