Definition of watershed – https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/watershed
1a: divide
b: a region or area bounded peripherally by a divide and draining ultimately to a particular watercourse or body of water
2: a crucial dividing point, line, or factor: Turning Point
No matter where I travel, from the classroom to the Home Depot language exchange to family in Northern Ireland for Christmas, people ask what a Trump presidency will mean for our nation and the rest of the world. I have no answers, no hypotheses. I just know, as the rest of us, this feels like a watershed moment.
The following exquisite lines from Simon Armitage’s frightening 1963 poem “Gooseberry Season” capture an alarming sense of landmark change.
Where does the hand become the wrist?
Where does the neck become the shoulder? The watershed
and then the weight, whatever turns up and tips us over that
razor’s edge
between something and nothing, between
one and the other.
(Read more of the poem at: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/gooseberry-season)
Speaking of watersheds, I have three poems appearing in the Fall 2016 issue of Watershed Review http://www.csuchico.edu/watershed: “Recipe for Peach Salsa,” Dancing a Little, and “Jesús Wants to learn to use the internet.” (http://www.csuchico.edu/watershed/2016-fall/poetry/hutcheson-heather.shtml)
Many thanks to the editors for including my work in this knockout publication.
- Armitage’s poem is a mini horror story. Confide an equally sinister confession.
