Our Response to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Outbreak

As a precaution to help limit the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19) and care for our community, Just Buffalo Literary Center has postponed a number of events, and we will follow the guidance of Buffalo Public Schools in terms of Just Buffalo Writing Center programming.

Learn More

Over the Skyway by Theresa Wyatt

I sing you, Great Lake, carved out of glacier ice
with your fantastical moods of storm seiche
and lightning flashes. You are a Whitman song
of self, shimmering in Prussian blue, gifting
us tributaries with sturgeon & trout.
Over the Skyway I sing you –
to your bedrock shale that couches
the thinning bones of storied shipwrecks,
to your magnificent mist & gales that blow me
home along the Seaway Trail, along creeks
& harbors, secret waterfalls, wind turbines
& river flats – all of you spectacular,
all of you a masthead, breathtaking.

About the Poet

Theresa Wyatt

Theresa Wyatt is a Buffalo area-based poet, visual artist, and retired educator. She is the author of the full-length collections The Beautiful Transport (Moonstone Press, 2023), a finalist in the Moonstone Chapbook Competition in 2022, and Hurled into Gettysburg (BlazeVOX Books, 2018), a collection of poems inspired by the 1863 Civil War battle, and as well as the chapbook Arrowheads Everywhere (Derby by the Lake Project, 2016). Her work has appeared in New Flash Fiction Review, Spillway, Snapdragon, steel bellow, The Ekphrastic Review, The Healing Muse, The Phare, W.W. Norton’s New Micro, and elsewhere. She credits her artistic parents, participation in the Siena, Italy Program during college, and teaching in the NYS prison system and traveling across America and abroad – as the major influences on her life.

This poem is one of many responses to Just Buffalo Literary Center’s call for work inspired by the National Endowment for the Arts The Big Read Program’s “Where We Live” writing prompt.

The Poem of the Week feature is curated by literary legacy awardee R.D. Pohl.