Read the poem ‘Retirement’ by Betty Culley

Betty Culley, a Maine-based poet and novelist, has a new poem titled "Retirement" featured this week in the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance series "Deep Water: Maine Poems." The poem meditates on the passage of time through images of pasture, pine woods, and a solitary old tree watching over a landscape where cattle once grazed.

"Retirement" opens on a green pasture sloping gently south toward Pattee Brook, a scene rooted in the countryside of central Maine. Culley evokes what the land looked like before it was cleared — a pine forest where fallen apples lay hard and green on the forest floor. The poem's central image arrives in its closing lines, as an old tree "wondering where the cows went, and why / they took the sun with them / when they left."

The poem is published here by permission of the author and is copyrighted 2025. Its placement in "Deep Water: Maine Poems" is curated by series producer Megan Grumbling, a poet and writer who lives in Portland.

Culley is known to young readers across the country for her verse and middle grade fiction. Her young adult verse novels include "Three Things I Know Are True" and "The Name She Gave Me," and her middle grade novels include "Down to Earth" and "The Natural Genius of Ants." Her latest middle grade novel, "Landslide," was published in March 2026 by Nancy Paulsen Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

A resident of the small town of Mercer, Culley previously worked as an obstetrics nurse and as a pediatric home hospice nurse before turning full time to writing. Her poetry, like her prose, often draws on the landscapes and small communities of rural Maine.

"Deep Water: Maine Poems" appears in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance.