Lily Brown – Poetry

“Take My Waking” is from Lily Brown’s book Blade Work, which just won the 2026 Maine Literary Award for poetry. It seems in this early morning light, the speaker has willed herself awake from a troubling dream that has left her “mid-cycle, midnight / amidst dream, and so fright.” She finds herself “mid-fidget, mid-cry, mid-life” at sunrise in a dark state of mind. There’s something beautifully hypnotic in the music of the words. Brown uses vowel and consonant sounds to evoke a still unsettled post-dream state. I love the metaphor of scrolling into wakefulness, which certainly hints at the way we wake into the content and news feed on our phones. But there’s mystery here. The speaker doesn’t tell us what she dreamed or why the rage. The poem isn’t about that story, it’s about capturing an elusive moment that we have all shared and is so hard to put into words. Brown gives us its elusive resonance. The poem begins with sunrise and ends with the hall’s “electric bright;” light begins and ends this liminal experience.

—Betsy Sholl, Maine Arts Journal Poetry Editor

 

Take My Waking

 

The sunrise looks heated,

moves slow over trees,

tricking we who learn

rage through waking.

 

Mid-cycle, midnight,

amidst dream, and so fright,

mid-fidget, mid-cry

mid-life.

 

At first, I scrolled

into wakefulness,

eating its dark cries.

 

Then I wanted sleep again,

forgot the willed waking

I’d craved.

 

Soon the brain turns

back to front.

The waking rage subsides.

 

I see a figure forming near

the hall’s electric bright.

 

 

In “Sparrow Ocean,” Lily Brown responds to Liz Kalloch’s painting, First Light, which was part of a UMVA exhibition at the Oak St. Lofts Gallery, entitled Celebrating Hope. In gazing at this painting, Brown allows herself to enter the abstractions and let them inhabit her imagination, including both the knowns and unknowns of her world. It reminds me of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke saying that we gaze at something until it in turn sees us. As Lily gazes, the whole complexity of our world comes into view—the small and large of barnacles and “whalefall,” our historical shadows and light, that “blubbery history” and “blister.”

 

Sparrow Ocean

after Liz Kalloch’s First Light

 

I could see an orange for a sun.

Barnacles washed in the waves of dawn.

Through fog, a batty rabbit

floating from its frame.

Sky, snow, the spectral

maws of dogs or birds,

beasts with swords for beaks.

 

Then the ragged coastline

of this wild dark,

rocky outcrops,

underwater churn,

marine light like starlight

down in the darkest black,

the Hadal zone.

 

A pyramid’s sharp power is

uncloaked by my finer eye.

And a needle rising

like Bunker Hill sews history

into this city night—

Boston, Cairo. The underworld,

meanwhile, fed by whalefall,

our blubbery history

a blister in the deepest reach.

 

Lily Brown is the author of Blade Work, winner of the 2026 Maine Book Award for Poetry and the New Measure Poetry Prize (Parlor Press, 2025); Rust or Go Missing (Cleveland State University Poetry Center); and several chapbooks, including The Haptic Cold (Ugly Duckling Presse). She lives in Maine with her family and works as a writing teacher.