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Nahant: Poetry by the Sea

 

POLLY BRADLEY

POLLY BRADLEY        ( 1932 –     ) is a longtime Nahant resident active in community affairs.  She was chair of the committee that produced Nahant Voices, a 1984 anthology of Nahant writing, she wrote an environmental column for the Massachusetts Audubon Society for fourteen years, and she has worked for many years on behalf of Nahant residents as chairperson of SWIM (Safe Waters for Massachusetts). Born in Ponca City, OK, she came east to attend Radcliffe College, and with her future husband Larry, then an MIT student, first traveled to Nahant via bus and subway to be near the ocean.  Both the sonnet “Sources of Strength” and “Skipping Stone” show the poet’s deep engagement with Nahant’s seashore.In 2011, the self-published Seaward Skyward collected a lifetime of Polly Bradley's poetry, embodying her humor and her love of family, nature and Nahant.

 

 

One windless, waveless morning you pitched a mottled skipping stone - glacial smooth pink granite - past Nahant’s barnacled boulders. Six times, Boston’s reflection rippled, expanded, returned. Lightly leaping, flatly sinking the skipping stone slid harmlessly below blue surface, below brown kelp beside a startled flounder. A thousand skipping stones await tomorrow’s toss.

 

 

courtesy: Polly Bradley