“My kind of people are kind people My kind of people are kind If you got a good heart That’s a good start”
— Maia Sharp from her song “Kind” (Thank you to Sisters Folk Festival for bringing Maia to Oregon).
I’m grateful to be part of an online autumn ekphrastic poetry group of creative and giving women. (The art images follow each poem). Our supportive group lost a gifted, generous, kind, brave, and progressive poet last week to cancer. We are feeling sorrow, even as we keep putting our voices out into this world to make a difference as Jenn would have wanted. Reading her many published poems, I came across a line that I had not seen when I wrote about the cicada and titled the piece Ciradian Rhythms–and smiled to feel in synchrony with Jenn. (See her poem Plume). Her local paper in Marblehead, Massachusetts, published this tribute.
All the following poems I’ve written this month–and I’m still revising them. Thank you for being my readers.
We Will Not Stand By for a Silent Spring For Rachel Carson
If hope is the thing with feathers Surely Emily Dickinson meant living birds, not stuffed in a museum drawer, eye sockets filled with cotton, bodies pressed close, iridescent blue of Indigo Bunting disheveled as dirty torn jeans, scuffed as worn-out leather boots, all that is left after the breakup with nature.
If the bluebird carries the sky on his back but the sky has lost her brethren birds– three billion fewer than 1970– What might Henry David Thoreau say if we could pull him out of a drawer, Breathe life into his mummified body where he lies wearing his one set of clothes, squeezed between Emerson and Alcott and all forgotten transcendentalists?
When the caged bird sings Maya Angelou opens the study skins of our souls. Whispers what we must do for Indigo Buntings to daub our dull sky spirits in turquoise, cerulean, periwinkle, cobalt, and joy, for feathers to brush our drawn faces into a glow of almost hope as we rush to join our friends forming a living wall of resistance, knowing we have each other’s backs.
Leah Sobsey “Passerina Cyanea, Indigo Bunting, North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences” (USA) 2007 – archival pigment print
Turning in the Manuscript
I woke at dawn to find my fingers had turned to twigs tapping alphabets in the language of Tree as fir needles sprout from my hands, ready to sip sunshine.
What did I expect after all this time writing about trees and birds? Inevitable that a Pacific Wren would come to perch on my toes
singing in the language of Rivulet spraying droplets, misting my vision, turning walls to moss, ceiling to canopy floor to fern-lined sylvan stream
where American Dipper is dipping and blinking before plunging into purling currents and waterfalls, sprinkling holy water
in the reverence of ancient forest where Pileated Woodpecker drums on hollow cedar harboring Spotted Owl feeding red tree vole to fuzzy owlet.
Immersing, camouflaging, merging until my tousled head spires the sky, my branching arms shake and quiver with a flock of Red Crossbills
scissoring the scales of cones to extract their resiny seeds. How to know the time of ripening, when to seed cumulus clouds in a rain of birds?
Hugh Hayden “Brier Patch” (USA) 2018 – sculpted fir with plywood and hardware
River Gamble
Edge of ice. Great blue heron sights down spearing beak Blinks predator eyes, stretches sinuous neck. A blue streak
Arctic wind frenzies pooled waters into abstract smear Sombers evergreen forest Shatters slumbering mirror
Heron stares among jagged shards Lifts webbed foot at glacial pace Feathers shuffling storm cards Prepares lightning strike
Upended by one living arrow Pierces taut river skin. White blush Dazed heron. Spiked harrow. Belted Kingfisher. Royal flush
Joan Mitchell “Quatuor II for Betsy Jolas” (USA) 1976
Circadian Rhythm
You of stained glass wing So still and dead, pinned in a tray, not knowing the artist is sketching every detail of your cathedral body.
She treats you as holy, because you are proof of Resurrection. Seventeen years underground.
Thousands crawling from soil to grow wings. Strange angels gone percussive forgoing harps for tympani drums.
Trees abuzz. Leaves shaking. This wild choir performing a gyrating hurricane of earsplitting cicada hallelujahs
as picnickers clap hands over ears, sweep your kin’s dead husks off tablecloths. Oblivious to miracles in plain sight.
Gail Adelle Hansberry “Cicada” (USA) Mid-Century – etching in paper.
Splintered boards painted forget-me-not blue Blue of seaglass tumbled and polished by sand Sand crusting eyelashes of a poet still dreaming Dreaming Monet watercolors raining the blues
Blues a blur of poem on paper floating downriver River eddying knots of wood in warping planks Planks boarding windows over bluebonnet prairie Prairie singing tallgrass and vesper sparrow elegies
Elegies written on a drifting kingfisher feather Feather settling on cattail marsh sifting her seeds Seeds bearing the wish when she blew a breeze Breeze bearing gibbous moon always waxing full
Full as this basket in our hands, the one she wove Wove in moss, spider silk, lichen, and blessings Blessings once cupped in her poet hands Hands stilled as periwinkle dusk of last breath
Breath lighting a candle we cup, cradle flame Flame spread poet to poet, linking stanzas Stanzas strong enough to form a cup nest Nesting brave verses of brave women
Women glowing, gathering our hidden power Power to splinter every door and glass ceiling Ceiling split open into a wide beckoning sky Sky a field of blue flowers showered in butterflies.
