Born in Idaho during World War II, Markay graduated magna cum laude from BYU in 1989 where she met her husband, fellow poet, and writer, Nad Richard Brown. Together they have published two books of poetry, Blended, a collection, and Behind the Red Door, poems written from their experiences living in Russia as humanitarian missionaries.
Markay received first place in the 2014 Utah Arts Original Writing Competition, book-length poetry, judged by Richard Howard, professor at Columbia University. Her poems have appeared in Utah Voices, Sand & Sky, Segullah, Provo Orem Word, 15 Bytes, Encore, Dove Song, Southern Quill, and elsewhere. She has received awards for individual poems from Red Butte Gardens, Segullah, Utah Original Writing Competition, Utah State Poetry Society and the National Federation of Poetry Societies. In 2019 she was named Utah State Poetry Society’s poet of the year, winning their publication award for her book, Planted in a Storm.
Currently, she is president of Redrock Writers, has served as a member of the Tuacahn Guild, and on the board of directors for the St. George Literary Arts Festival.
She and her husband live in St. George, and are parents of five sons, grandparents to thirteen. Family, friends, books, music, writing and walking in the red rocks make her happy. Quoting a poet friend, Markay explains, “I write because I don’t drink.”
Work
We Were Potato Eaters
We Were Potato Eaters
—on visiting an art exhibit by Rebecca Campbell
It’s easy to forget a small Idaho town
until Campbell strokes it back
with slashes of color
like welts across my face.
The body memorizes the past
even when the mind cuts it off
like a chunk of rabbit into stew
steamed with onions and potatoes.
In her painting, there are such familiar hills,
flat fields framed by a sagging clothesline smile
dull as the man she paints, shirtless,
bent in half to unearth spuds clustered
wrathfully on a vine.
She paints a pair of sisters, blonde
in the mist of gray and white memories,
clasped and tangled, faces grimaced
on what she notes as the day of hardship,
the war-time day death stole
their airman brother
as well as their mother’s newborn.
I remember snow
deathly deep, wind whipping through ice—
the rusted water tank on tall iron legs, awful
Eiffel standing over the town
as pool hall Saturday-night brawls
broke noses and captain chairs.
I smell the belch of stale beer, hear
the slam of bruised bedroom doors.
With Campbell, I find sense
in the senseless—thanks
to bottled peaches, purple iris,
work socks scrubbed on a board.
And we both know potatoes—
eyes becoming seeds, becoming leaves, becoming
tubers guarded in the hill until they yield.
We eat what we have planted.
Equinox
Equinox
Harvest moon rises, proclaims parity
in the skies, as day and night stop
pulling the covers one way or the other
and each has twelve hours of rest.
Sun rises due east, sets due west,
not straying one way or another
unlike politicians who sway
with their donors.
Those who feel slighted can straddle
the equator, a foot in both hemispheres.
The sun stays centered,
plays no favorites.
Earth photos from space erase
dictators, legislators, commentators.
Hubble views earth as a sweet blur
among billions of Milky Way stars.
Awash in white light, the moon,
that peaceful old monk,
lifts his hood, bares his face,
absolves earthly bonds for the night.
Listening to the Poet
Listening to the Poet
Unpretentious as a desert sparrow,
an apricot hanging where it grows,
a stone worn by the river, she brings
her vision of worlds—tangible
and not—to our minds.
She speaks the history of stolen ribs,
the age of light, the voice of humpbacks,
locked tongue of rocks—holds
a mirror to our earthbound memories.
Testing our expectations, she flourishes a silk
mandarin sash, swirls scent of orange blossoms
through the first row, flings it around her shoulders, then pulls it aside,
her magic beyond appearance:
lyrical names of birds—
black-winged stilt, golden plover,
Caspian tern, wandering tattler
of trees—
shagbark hickory, speckled alder,
paper birch, slippery elm
of creature calls—
the piping of curlew, antelope’s snorf,
trill of raccoon and cricket.
She christens nature,
Eve without scarf or leaf
teaching us Earth’s names
for God.
Being Here
Being Here
We trek the trails, but how we overlook
the view though turnouts posted on our way
should lure our eyes to nature’s shafts of light,
the copper mountain’s glow, the river’s pull—
its restless course to surf-churned seas, the lift,
the wraith of eagle wings—wisteria’s sigh.
The earth discloses clues to how and why
we’re here. The clockwork rising of the sun,
the yin and yang, the pledge of seed and birth,
the breath of life for fox or tree or man
show pattern, weft and warp with silver threads
beyond string theory, holes and hums of stars.
Bibliography
Planted in a Storm, Utah State Poetry Society, 2019
Links
Segullah Podcast
15 Bytes
Association of Mormon Letters