Dannye Romine Powell
Poetry
Dannye Romine Powell’s fifth collection, In the Sunroom with Raymond Carver, won the Roanoke Chowan Award for 2020 for the best book of poetry published that year by a North Carolinian. Her poems have appeared over the years in Harvard Review Online, Ploughshares, Poetry, 32 Poems, Arts & Letters, Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere. Her poem, “Pride,” will appear in The Southern Review in 2022.
We Sit in the Red Glider These Late Summer Evenings
“ I wrote this poem at age 79 (I’m now 80), the same age my mother suffered a major stroke that paralyzed her left side. I worried that whole year that I would also suffer a stroke. So one evening, as my husband and I enjoyed the cool air outdoors, I was thinking about what fate might await me, and I looked over at my husband, and he was smiling this wonderful smile, and I could tell he was thinking about baseball and not giving one thought to our mortality. The differences in our personalities have kept our marriage alive and lively all these years. ”