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Theft
On the answering machine, her voice is faint,
not with the distance, but with the hurt.
She says she painted all afternoon in the city,
but the canvas is gone—stolen
while she was sleeping on the train.
It was good too, she says. A good start.
I can feel the thrumming train,
the heat, the daylight lingering heavily
on the skyline beyond the window, the tiredness
of travel, the tiredness after good work.
I see how it must have happened:
her head nodding, and the shadow moving
toward her, down the aisle, and then away.
A thing of beauty, the poet says, will never
pass into nothingness. Beautiful—that painting once
propped beside her, on the train, in the faraway city.
Beautiful still, in the hands of the thief.
Poem copyright by Madeleine Mysko, from the book CRUCIAL BLUE, forthcoming from Rager Media.
Photo of Madeleine Mysko: copyright by Miriam Berkley
About Madeleine Mysko
Madeleine Mysko's work, both poetry and prose, has been published in such venues as The Hudson Review, Shenandoah, Commonweal,
River Styx, The Christian Century, and The Baltimore Sun. A graduate of The Writing Seminars of The Johns Hopkins
University, she teaches creative writing both privately and in the Johns Hopkins Advanced Academic Programs. She is also a
registered nurse with experience in Assisted living. Among her awards are two Individual Artist grants from the Maryland State
Arts Council, a Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, and an Artscape Prize for Fiction from the City of Baltimore.
Click here to read about Madeleine Mysko's debut novel, Bringing Vincent Home, in THE EXAMINER (quotes from the article below,
including a blurb from Tim O'Brien).
'A contemporary of Mysko in the business of spinning truth from the lies of Vietnam is Tim O’Brien —
they are both 61 — one of the finest novelists alive.
The author of “The Things They Carried,” and “In the Lake of the Woods,” among other novels, O’Brien
almost never promotes other people's books. But the National Book Award winner took the time to give a quote for the back
of “Bringing Vincent Home.”
“Rarely does a book of any sort touch me as this one did,” wrote O’Brien, who pulled duty as a foot soldier
in Quang Ngai in 1969.'
Click here to visit Madeleine Mysko's website.
Click here to visit photographer Miriam Berkley's page on Publishers Marketplace:
Before turning to photography full-time in 1989, I wrote book reviews, author interviews, publisher profiles and
photography articles and reviews for such publications as Publishers Weekly, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Sun-Times,
The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Popular Photography, and American Photographer, which
also published my full-page-plus photograph of Andreas Feininger. For my writing, I was a recipient of an NEH grant for journalists
and I was a Scholar in Non-Fiction at the 1984 Bread Loaf Writers Conference.
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