Ruth Stone (1915–2011) was the author of thirteen poetry collections and the recipient of many awards, including the National Book Award, which she won at the age of eighty-seven for In the Next Galaxy. Her unusual story of personal struggle and belated acclaim was dominated by her husband’s suicide in 1959. Stone went on to raise three daughters and considered her work “love poems, all written to a dead man.” She taught in universities around the country, including SUNY–Binghamton. For more than fifty years she lived and wrote in her farmhouse in Goshen, Vermont.


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Sin

by Ruth Stone

I remember a Harvard student,
who couldn’t admit to himself
that he was gay,
suddenly one day
telling everyone
he was a lampshade.
He was so convinced
he tried to stick his fingers
into wall sockets.
The ambulance squad
wrapped him in a straitjacket
and drove him away.

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