Sharon Rook Daly

CONTACT
srookdaly@gmail.com

BIO
Sharon Rook Daly is a veteran educator and fellow of the Greater Madison Writing Project, which she credits with setting her poetry in motion among other amazing writers/educators. Sharon hosts the annual WFOP Calendar reading event for the South Central Region and facilitates the biannual online celebration of poets whose work appears in the Solitary Plover, published by the  Friends of Lorine Niedecker. (lorine niedecker.org) She is a frequent presenter at educational conferences on topics including Writing Across the Curriculum, the Power of Poetry, and Writing in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications including Bramble, Hummingbird, Moss Piglet, Solitary Plover, WFOP Calendars, and Songs of Summer, an anthology of baseball published in 2025 by Waters Edge Press. (Ed Werstein and Tom Erickson, editors) She loves walking Wisconsin trails with her poetry-loving dog, perusing bookstore and library shelves, and sipping tea in cafe corners.

Poetry

On the old bent cane
a solitary raspberry
clutching the season

Published in Hummingbird XXXIII

Sailing Boat on the Seine at Asnières

After Sailing Boat on the Seine at Asnières, Vincent Van Gogh (1887), pencil, chalk, on paper

The paintings on the gallery walls captivated me.
Masterpieces.
Distinctive brushstrokes, vibrant with color.

I had traveled miles to view them up close.
They had traveled, too.

I made my way among the crowds to an unfinished sketch,
staved off by the lines of a boat on an ordinary piece of paper.

Here, a sailboat floats in the foreground
rendered in sensitive strokes.
There, the city of Asnières is visible across the Seine.
Built from the point of a pencil.

Printed words conjured colors in the mind:
bleu, vert, violet, celestial orange, cobalt

Van Gogh’s draft seemed newly rendered.
It survived, extant and unsinkable.
Ready to launch. Showing me how everything begins.

Published in Bramble, Winter/Spring 2024