In this week’s poem, Patricia Smith Ranzoni offers a homage to the spirit and legacy of Maine’s papermakers. I love this poem’s rich images of hands, fibers, and the elements, and its refrain of “Because” — repeated like a song, or a sacred chant.

Ranzoni writes from Bucksport, where she is poet laureate and co-chairs the effort to found their paper making museum. Descending from subsistence wood- and water-working people from before Maine became a state, whose artifacts can still be found in the hedgerows, she is self-taught in poetry in the folk tradition of her family through the generations. Her work has appeared in The Island Journal, Maine Arts Journal, and the Italian journal Tellūs, and North Woods at Night: Literary Reflections on Maine’s Largest Forest.

Papermakers Still

Now that the mill is gone

Because it was in our trees
Because it was in our air
Because it was in our waters and fire
Because it was in us heart to bone
Because it still is

Because all fibers might be pressed
Because tea leaves can be read
Because pulp can be shredded and beat
Because petals can be dried and spread
Because threads can be felted and paged
Because the papermakers’ sons
and daughters still are
Because it is in our hands

— Patricia Smith Ranzoni

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. DEEP WATER: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Papermakers Still,” copyright 2017 by Patricia Smith Ranzoni, was originally published in Still Mill: Poems, Stories & Songs of Making Paper in Bucksport, Maine 1930 – 2014 (North Country Press 2017). It appears by permission of the author.