Featured Poet: Diana Durham, Portsmouth
 Diana Durham is a poet and writer, author of two poetry collections, 'Sea of Glass' (Diamond Press, London), and 'To the End of the Night' (Northwoods Press, Maine, winner of their annual competition) and the non-fiction book 'The Return of King Arthur: finishing the quest for wholeness' (Tarcher/Penguin). She was Assistant Producer on the primetime network series 'Dinner on the Diner' for PBS. She runs workshops on the leadership implications of the Arthurian myths. Current projects include a radio play, ‘Perceval & the Grail’, a series of 55 sonnets and a new non-fiction book exploring the ethics of spiritual identity. Diana is a graduate of University College London, with a BA in English Literature, and is currently a Visiting Research Associate at Brandeis University Women’s Studies Research Center.
We were visiting Bath in Maine, and took a walk through a newly made trail by the Kennebec Estuary Land Trust that went up along the Whiskeag Creek, one of the tributaries of the Kennebec River. It was raining. Something about the rain on the water, and the unexpected wide expanse of land and water that could be glimpsed into the distance got me in touch with that extraordinary quality of North America, which perhaps as a English woman, I am more susceptible to than those born and bred here, the sense of unending space, land, water, emptiness, bounty, grace, the vastness, the minuteness of scale and instead this time of feeling slightly overwhelmed by it, I felt excitement gratitude, wonder, and at the same time, a line came to me about language being a net, and somehow the wonder of it being able to continuously stretch out with our thought into this endlessness, the infinite universe.
Endless
language is a great net, fine as fine grey
rain threading grey skies, wooded water ways
of the Whiskeag Creek’s wide tributary
where over and over the rain lines say
something almost the same, just in case this
can be caught, or glimpsed intermittently
slipping along the trail, in a phrase
that captures miles, years of territory
it will stretch out as far as thought will go -
a mesh of lichen blooms, small pink moss lace
patterning the granite - it might just know
all this, it might just reach as far as space
it might just keep saying endless, endless
the rain on a grey creek, the spread of trees
Whiskeag Creek Trail, Kennebec Estuary Land Trust
by Whiskeag Creek, tributary to the Kennebec River,
near Bath, Maine
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