Although she had written all of her life, Virginia Hamilton Adair didn’t publish her first book until she was 83, by which time glaucoma had left her blind. Ants on the Melon appeared in 1996 to wide acclaim for its playful rhymes, beguiling sense of nostalgia, and the poet’s frank, often humorous take on her blindness. She published two other books before her death: Beliefs and Blasphemies and Living on Fire.
By Virginia Hamilton Adair
Past the fourth cloverleaf, by dwindling roads
At last we came into the unleashed wind;
The Chesapeake rose to meet us at a dead end
Beyond the carnival wheels and gingerbread.
Forsaken by summer, the wharf. The oil-green waves
Flung yellow foam and sucked at...
By Virginia Hamilton Adair
Always the caravan of sound made us halt
to admire the swinging and the swift go-by
of beasts with enormous hooves and heads
beating the earth or reared against the sky.
Do not reread, I mean glance ahead to see
what has become of the...
