July 2017

Penny Harter
penhart@2hweb.net

I'm a poet and writer living in the South Jersey shore area. I moved here from North Jersey in January of 2009 after the 2008 death of my husband William J. (Bill) Higginson, author of The Haiku Handbook, to be closer to my daughter and family. I'm a mom, grandma, and occasional poet-teacher for the NJSCA. My work has appeared in many journals, and in twenty-some books (including chapbooks). I read at the Dodge Festival in 2010, and have enjoyed two poetry residencies at VCCA  (January 2011; March 2015).  Please visit my blog: http://penhart.wordpress.com  and my website: www.2hweb.net/penhart.  My newest books are Recycling Starlight and The Resonance Around Us: http://mountainsandriverspress.org/TitleView.aspx ​
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                 Rosa Faust, my great-grandmother​​

This photo was taken in Fairfax, South Carolina, where my father was born and grew up on a farm. He told me that Rosa, and her ancestors (one of whom was probably the "grandmother" I met in my dream, since she was on a bed of pelts) were among the Southern Cherokee who hid out in the Great Smokies and didn't take the Trail of Tears. However, I did meet Rosa, herself, when I was a very little girl visiting the farm. She was sitting in a rocking chair out by the barn, long gray braids down the front of her shoulders.

​Dream Meeting


On the way to meet her, 
I poled upstream for hours
through the swampy dark,
arrived at dawn, to enter
a log house where an old
woman, on a narrow bench
of pelts rose up on one elbow.

Gray hair spilling down her
bones, she stared at me. 
Meet your great-grandmother,
a voice instructed, and I did,
this woman of the Cherokee,
her eyes demanding mine as I
stood silent on the dirt, lost in
crickets and the sound of
the stream that carries me.​

  © 2017 Penny Harter

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