Iris G. Press
I. Giraffe Press
DAINA SAVAGE
Lancaster County’s second poet laureate, Daina Savage, works as a freelance journalist for magazines and newspapers in the Mid-Atlantic region, with more than 3,000 published stories. She is a co-founder and co-director of the Spoken Word Festival in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. As the director of the Lancaster Poetry Continuum, she organized numerous poetry reading series in Lancaster museums, bookstores, and coffee shops. She is the co-founder of the Lancaster County Young Writers Workshop. Her poetry has been published in numerous regional journals and has garnered many writing awards. She is the 2013 recipient of the R.E. Foundation Award for Outstanding Poetry and her work has been nominated for the 2014 Pushcart Prize. Her debut collection of poetry, Traces, was published in 2013 by Iris G. Press.
Generations
For your birthday
she gives you Maruska dolls,
fitting together the way we
must have fit.
You inside me
me inside her
and she inside her mother
Our features, so close
to one another.
The blue, blue eyes
that startle.
The blond curls
that darken with age.
And the fine, long fingers
that come as adeptly to the ivory
of a keyboard
as to the task of fitting concrete
to stone.
And I see, as we four
gather around the card table
alternating Go Fish with Canasta,
that unlike Maruska dolls
we change sizes, until finally,
you, little one, will hold what’s left
of our opened shells
in your large, large heart.
Daina Savage
from Traces