Lynn Veach Sadler
2011 North Carolina Honor Scroll Award

Former college president Dr. Lynn Veach Sadler, 71, has published widely in academics and creative writing. The editor, poet, fiction/creative nonfiction writer, and playwright has traveled around the world five times, writing all the way, and now works full-time as a creative writer and an editor. She has seven poetry chapbooks out and one in press, as well as being a familiar name as award-winner in Senior Poets Laureate competitions. One story appears in Del Sol’s Best of 2004 Butler Prize Anthology; a novel will soon join her novella and short-story collection. She won the 2009 overall award of the San Diego City College National Writer’s Contest and Wayne State’s 2008 Pearson Award for a play on the Iraq wars. Her sign of the zodiac is Taurus.

APOLOGUE

He guarded his territory still,
would have no landing
in his shrinking world.
While the boat distracted,
Guide and I ascended rope ladder
hanging from a cliff, came in behind.
Shopworn, shoddy-furred, excoriated.
Moths of man had been at him.
He processed, nonetheless, upon the sand,
the black volcanic residue of sand.
A single sea lion processional,
Elgar playing in his head.
Mighty, majestic creature was he yet.
Primordiality upon the sands.
His rage, roar, triumph—
notice served when we first climbed
from sea with him, Sea-Kind.
Guide and I lingered,
kept the frenzied birds at bay.
Hours passed, birds obsessed,
he slowing, slowing, sinking,
sinking to the black volcanic soil.
When the final moment came, he knew,
rose off his flippers,
stood almost upright upon his tail,
Milton’s prelapsarian serpent.
Bellowed, roared, went quiet,
slipped elegantly down dead.
We half-dragged, half-lifted,
sent him back into the sea.
I did not cry.
I recited “Thanatopsis” to him.