Marguerite Guzman Bouvard

Besides writing books, Marguerite Guzman Bouvard has spent her life volunteering on behalf of social justice. She has been writing to a black prisoner in Lincoln Nebraska, helping him with his poetry, and has published a chapbook of his work called Soul Songs. We need to know that our prisons are filled with mostly black and Latino prisoners, many of whom made only minor offenses. Her new poetry book is Shades of Meaning and she is working on a non-fiction book, Climate Visionaries Around the World. She will have a new poetry book coming out in 2023. Marguerite supports the Mississippi Center for Justice.

The art of listening is fading,
the way light fades at the end
of the day, when we need
lamps, candles that erase
the shadows of the lies
we cling to, and separation,

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A Ukrainian army combat medic who
was decorating her new apartment in Kyiv
with pink carpets and fluffy curtains,
now sleeps in the basement of
a building converted into the headquarters
​for the Territorial Defense Forces,

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It drapes the shoulders of a woman
bent over her garden, fills
the empty glass on the windowsill.

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Miles of trees and bushes along Pilani​
Highway in Maui are smothered
with Kudzu until the landscape
has completely changed and lost

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the heavy crowds...one million,
are but a moment, their voices
stilled by one person, and behind
her the person who holds
the reins of prison, silence

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But a young teenager in a poor neighborhood
is writing poems about police patrolling
the streets and the fear that pervades them,
yet his verses are the wildflowers

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