On Beauty and Finding a Dead Flicker

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[Beauty] compels awe, and awe
Is well known for its capacity to silence.
Louise Glück

       

I’ve been thinking about beauty and how these blue birds ahead of me keep throwing themselves off the aspen snags.  Like a hinge, the mind already calling them ‘beautiful” and “sky,” though I don’t know really what beauty is or how to make it so in a poem about a gravel lane I keep writing. Leonard never sees the bluebirds, though he wants to, but, every day, I walk into them, little chips of sky I might touch. When Leonard was a boy, his mother taught him to sing a song about pockets and falling stars and he sings it to me now, when we are happiest. In just this hour, fall has towed in its clouds like blue barges. Beautiful. And I am remembering the earliest summer morning, not in this here, not in this now: tree swallows flushed above the sedge and a guttering of flickers. And now this perfect silhouette in the dirt I thought to photograph at my feet because there was light and there were wings and nothing to grieve, door nor earth.

flicker impression in the dirt made of feathers

The Butterfly: Apiculus and a Poem

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I found this on a flowering weed in Castlewood Park on a day I was looking for birds. Butterfly? Moth? To be honest, I didn’t know. And then I learned that the butterfly has a bulb at the end of its antenna, unlike the moth and its feathered one, and a hooked tip called the “apiculus.” The name of this butterfly? Such beautiful names to wander through: Swallowtails and Hairstreaks, Elfins and Metalmarks and Gossamer-winged. Just the names begin to find a poem. This little guy is part of the Grass Skippers Family, perhaps a Least Skipper, weak in the wings, or an Orange Skipperling, its eggs orange-ringed and its larva rolling up in a single blade of grass. I don’t really care which butterfly it is: I woke up and couldn’t sleep and now a coyote has wandered down the suburban drainage ditch a block from our house to sing and I’ve been thinking about poetry and found this poem by Pavel Friedmann, who wrote this one day in 1942 in the Theresienstadt concentration camp beneath a white chestnut and gave it to me, tonight, and now me to you:

The Butterfly

He was the last. Truly the last.
Such yellowness was bitter and blinding
Like the sun’s tear shattered on stone.
That was his true colour.
And how easily he climbed, and how high,
Certainly, climbing, he wanted
To kiss the last of my world.

I have been here for seven weeks,
‘Ghettoized’.
Who loved me have found me,
Daisies call to me,
And the branches also of the white chestnut in the yard.
But I haven’t seen a butterfly here.
That last one was the last one.
There are no butterflies, here, in the ghetto.

https://www.hmd.org.uk/resource/the-butterfly-by-pavel-friedmann/

Poetry

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Have you ever held the shell of something in your hand for a long time and loved it and never known it until, one day, you learn the name of it, like Moon Snail?

moon snail shell

Here it is. And here it will be, too:

I am thinking about the hand I found in Indiana, a mole’s hand, when I was somewhere near ten years old, back-walking from a bulldozed pond along a foot and cow path in an Indiana field my father owned. His weekend escape from medicine and the hospital rounds he’d leave us for in the Sunday afternoons of our returning. It was 1968, fifty-four years ago from where I sit now in my quiet Colorado study, a blue spruce at the window where chickadees fly, and where it brushes the eves in our February wind, and where I hold the shell of a moon snail I found in a sea drift a summer ago in Cape Cod with my love, as if it were time, salt-riped and smoothed, I cup in my hands.

from The Journal of the Unnaturalist

Poetry, whatever form, rocks.

Like these birds, my book, Flying Beneath the Dog Star, has arrived!

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You can find it on Amazon now, or Finishing Line Press. I’ll do a few events around it, beginning Tuesday at 6 p.m., February 15, at the Gallery R and Wine Bar in Boulder with Poet Jeffrey Franklin. Thanks, Colorado Poets Center!

Other upcoming events posted here.

Thanks to everyone who has supported me and this book!

Flying Beneath the Dog Star: Poems from a Pandemic cover

Not Too Perilous Publishing Conundrum in the Time of A Pandemic, especially in Colorado

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book cover
cover of book to soon be

January 22nd has come and gone and Flying Beneath the Dog Star: Poems from a Pandemic has been delayed by Covid and shipping slowdowns. Sad, but so trifling in comparison to lives continuing to be lost to this pandemic and to the fire devastation that Colorado experienced just weeks ago.

I’ve been promised that  Flying Beneath the Dog Star  will appear on the horizon in the next couple of weeks. I apologize for the delay to those of you who made early purchases. Once FBDS is officially published and shipped , it will also be available through, besides Finishing Line Press, amazon, good reads, barnes & noble etc etc. 

I begin a series of local readings and workshops starting in early February. Most of these will be available to anyone by Zoom. I invite you to all. You can find announcements, zoom links (and more specific details as each event approaches) at https://kathrynwinograd.com/events/

If you’re interested, you can also find my most recently published poetry, articles and interviews at:

Split Rock Review: On Cow Ponds and Glass Frogs: Using the Poetry Prompt  

                        and   Octopus on a Sea Dock 

Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment:  Crows, At the Naturalist’s Workshop, Hawks 101

 Independent Publisher: For the Love of the Writer: Creating the Humble Essayist Press

The Colorado Sun: SunLit Interview: In “Slow Arrow,” Kathryn Winograd wove threads of her mother’s voice  

And Sunlit Excerpt: “Skyglow” from Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children In “Skyglow,” a look to the heavens for beauty and meaning

 Colorado Poets Center The Colorado Poet Issue #30, Winter 2022: my interview with Abigail Chabitnoy on Poetry and  How To Dress A Fish

   Green Briar Review: my first cover photo for a literary journal: Heron in Winter

   Essays upcoming this spring in River Teeth: Journal of Nonfiction Narrative and   Terrain.org.

On The Poetry Prompt: Cow Ponds and Glass Frogs

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Given that my entire upcoming chapbook from Finishing Line Press, Flying Beneath the Dog Star: Poems from a Pandemic, came from using the NaPoWriMo poetry prompts during National Poetry Month, I do have a few things to share about using the poetry prompt. And Split Rock Review has just published a new poem, Octopus on a Sea Dock, that uses a whole mix of made-up poetry prompts like “use something from the day’s National Geographic” post, among others. . .

It’s a useful tool, so I took Split Rock Review up on its offer to publish On Cow Ponds and Glass Frogs: Using the Poetry Prompt. You can read it at Split Rock! And, yes, I had fun with it!

Split Rock Review

A Little Bird Photography News in a Poetry Blog

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Three years ago, my daughter and son-in-law gave me a special Christmas gift: a new camera. Since that day, I’ve been haunting rivers, woods, and fields for birds in a new journey, one beautiful way to look up and see the world new. Now, thanks to Green Briar Review, I can share my first cover photo of a Heron in Winter.

White-Eyes by Mary Oliver for the Holiday

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gulls over the reservoir

In winter
    all the singing is in
         the tops of the trees
             where the wind-bird

with its white eyes
    shoves and pushes
         among the branches.
             Like any of us

he wants to go to sleep,
    but he’s restless—
         he has an idea,
             and slowly it unfolds

from under his beating wings
    as long as he stays awake.
         But his big, round music, after all,
             is too breathy to last.

So, it’s over.
    In the pine-crown
         he makes his nest,
             he’s done all he can.

I don’t know the name of this bird,
    I only imagine his glittering beak
         tucked in a white wing
             while the clouds—

which he has summoned
    from the north—
         which he has taught
             to be mild, and silent—

thicken, and begin to fall
    into the world below
         like stars, or the feathers
               of some unimaginable bird

that loves us,
    that is asleep now, and silent—
         that has turned itself
             into snow.

Poem from Poetry Foundation

SunLit Interview: In “Slow Arrow,” Kathryn Winograd wove threads of her mother’s voice

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I’ve been waiting for this. Right at the moment when we all went into lockdown at the start of the pandemic and my mother would begin a series of emergency room visits that led finally in just a few months to the hospice, my book, slow arrow: unearthing the frail children, came out. My mother never got to read it. It was one of the saddest times in my life. The book went on to win a bronze medal in essay for the independent publishers book award, a prize that put me next to lia purpura, who won the gold medal and is one of my favorite essayists. I was thankful to do this interview, which brought me back to my mother and those trips we made across teller county. I can still hear my mother, Ohio native of beautiful red and orange trees, complaining in fall: “What, another yellow leaf?” This is an interview about the journey of one book and the love for a mother.

https://coloradosun.com/2021/11/21/sunlit-kathryn-winograd-slow-arrow/?mc_cid=412ac0e43c&mc_eid=2d1626e5ec
Slow Arrow BookCover

You can read an excerpt of Sky Glow here.

Octopus on a Sea Dock: New Poem at Split Rock Review

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this lovely image popped up from Split Rock Review on Facebook
with the link to my poem

So another prompt-inspired poem, this one from an April 2021 National Poetry Prompt at NaPoWriMO:

“Go to the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows and choose a word to work with.” I chose “onism”: awareness of how little of the world you’ll experience, which seemed apropos for that past year’s solitude. And then I thought about imagination and memory and went places I never expected, certainly one of the joys of writing poetry.

Octopus on a Sea Dock

It floated out from a sea bucket
into the silver spilt water
of the sea dock we’d come to visit,
so quiet at our feet
that the fishermen nearby were oblivious,
their fishing poles . . .

Read the rest here at Split Rock Review

Pre-orders for Flying Beneath the Dog Star: Poems from a Pandemic are open until November 29. Flying Beneath the Dog Star was a semi-finalist for the Finishing Line Press 2020 Open Chapbook Contest. The chapbook, fingers-crossed for a lightening of the shipping boat snafus, comes out at the end of January 2022.