Doing the month long NaPoWriMo poetry prompts with my poet friend Marty McGovern. If you’re a poet and aren’t doin’ it, try it. It’s fun and you never know what you are going to end up with.
Here’s my stab for Day Five, using Stanley Kunitz’s poem, End of Summer, for my prompt, using the same first letters in each line (okay, I cheated in the last line) and following loosely the line length. (okay, I cheated there too!) (oh, and I didn’t rhyme . . . whoops!)
The Sandhill Cranes of San Luis Valley
to Lucy
A half-thermal of air and a left off Highway 160 arrested the cold of glacial farm fields we passed, shaken by a year of such frost
we will not forget. We stand in a rutted drive amid winter refuse and ditches, unready to be awoke, to go glittering beneath the half-fences, the dark of our cameras we uncap
blown with such light we had forgot. A crane flies out of a wind block of marsh, then wave after wave of rose-tipped cranes plow the winter sky, the cold we’ve owned.
Already what we prayed for craters us into unimaginable spring: a volcano’s old mouth, we dared to enter, enflamed by cranes, thousands in old potato fields, and leaping.
Thank you to Veronica Patterson, Loveland’s first poet Laureate, for sharing my two poems, “To Three Ducks Flying Beneath the Dog Star” and “Waking After Eighteen Hundred Dead,” as part of April’s National Poetry Month, on her Loveland Poet Laureate facebook site.
TODAYS POET ♦
Today’s National Poetry Month poet who read in Loveland as part of the Poets in the Park series is Kathryn Winograd. The poems presented are *TO THE THREE DUCKS FLYING BENEATH THE DOG STAR* and *WAKING AFTER EIGHTEEN HUNDRED DIE.* Of the latter, Kathryn writes, “This poem I wrote after the rising of the pink moon and one of our terrible nights of so many dead.”
♦
TO THE THREE DUCKS FLYING BENEATH THE DOG STAR
So little you know, wild-winged and unshaken beneath a dog star, half-grazing the pines, the bare winter aspen I stand in the dark wash of waiting for the tip of a yellow moon. In Ohio, girlhood, these April stars circled a pond bull-dozed by my father, a raft of cattail where the red-wings spun their nests above the scrim of caught water. Tonight, in this near dark, so close my hand could circle it, Sirius hovers above the red factory lights of Pueblo and the Sangre de Cristo blue-washed in this hour. I am cold in this wind, in this spine of the Milky way, these blue white stars named for a bear or a lyre or a woman weeping her dead into a river. I think I was still half-sleeping in a field of grass, in a haze of stars, in a far and nameless country you care nothing about, burying and unburying those I love. Such quiet, the mining trucks to the north stalled and the little generator of a shed where no one lives in winter shut down. And then, your wings, almost, against the moon. Why am I always alone, searching for something beautiful?
♦
WAKING AFTER EIGHTEEN HUNDRED DIE
Prayer began early before the sterling jays dove, then clattered at our window, flicked the blue dark storm of their tails. Our pale trees bow down secretly and a nuthatch teeters upside down from the post of the birdfeeder I buried with stones another spring, his thin straight beak tapping at the seed I leave out all night. My breath, how lightly it floats in this chill spring like a delicate frost of air I can walk through. I take the wood axe from our tool shed to split the old wood we felled and stacked years past. Last night I stood alone in the deepening dusk, in the silence, as if I could rename each splinter of star I did not know. And then the pink moon soft as the fingertips of the dead slid over the mountain and I lit fires beneath a moon of far blossoms. How long ago it seems, springs when we could just count the catkin on the budding aspen and step so carefully through the winter grass so as not to crush the white globes of the wind flowers lifting themselves from the cold earth.
~ Published in Colorado, Write On/The Colorado Sun
PROMPT: In her poem “Waking After Eighteen Hundred Die,” the poet does not write directly about this time of the corona virus. And yet the details and images of the poem embody it. Try writing about what you observe in the world now and letting the poem’s title, which the reader will return to, be an anchor.
Kathryn’s new book of essays, *Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children,* has recently been released. Here is a trailer for her new book: https://www.youtube.com/watch…
Here is a link to more about Kathryn Winograd and her work: kathrynwinograd.com.