Synkroniciti is pleased to welcome poet Meredith Davies Hadaway from Maryland. “By Hand” is an exploration of the creative process, a process that is “like breathing, easy, unless/ you think about it.” And we humans are such overthinkers. With her clear imagery and simple forthrightness, Meredith shows us how a sense of wonder and humility can free us from the traps that we set for ourselves, traps that come with success and training, and help us let go of our crippling desire for control. She reminds us that our artwork has an impact, a life, if you will, separate from our own. The second poem, “Fourth of July,” is a timely reminder to evaluate how our behavior impacts other species and our planet. Meredith shows us a pair of osprey caring for their young as fireworks burst in the sky on July Fourth, Independence Day here in the US. Her empathy places us in the nest and asks the cutting question, “What makes us think/ this night is ours to burn?” It is an appeal to humanity to curb our self-centered ignorance and cruelty. “Fourth of July” is influenced by haiku with its low syllable counts, nature imagery, and cutting idea, but Meredith has relaxed the syllable counts slightly and expanded the form into two stanzas of four followed by a couplet. She has also presented the poem with indents that, visually, recall bird wings and, practically, slow down the rhythm of our reading. These formal decisions give us more time to focus on the scene and understand it in a new way.
Read Meredith’s insightful poetry in Synkroniciti’s “Vulnerable” issue, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Meredith Davies Hadaway is a teacher of ecopoetry, a therapeutic musician, and a visual artist whose work explores Chesapeake landscapes. She is the author of three poetry collections: Fishing Secrets of the Dead, The River is a Reason, and At the Narrows (winner of the Delmarva Book Prize for Creative Writing) and most recently a collaborative chapbook of miniature poems and paintings with artist Marcy Dunn Ramsey. She is currently the Sophie Kerr Poet-in-Residence at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. Her website is https://www.meredithdavieshadaway.com/