February 2015

FEATURED POET: Jeannine Hall Gailey recently served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington. She’s the author of four books of poetry: Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, and her latest, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, from Mayapple Press. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, and in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review and Prairie Schooner. Her web site is www.webbish6.com     

Jeannie Hall Gailey- Gala Reading Video

A Morning of Sunflowers (for Fukushima)

Two hundred thousand sunflowers
drink the cesium from the grounds of the temple
where they burn the names of the dead.

This invisible snow, says the temple’s monk,
brings us a long winter. A village woman mourns
the loss of her blueberries.

In Chernobyl they grew amaranthus, field mustard,
sunflowers. But how to dispose
of poisoned flowers in spring?


We build lanterns. We plant seeds. We set things alight.

(Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg award winner in 2011)

The Robot Scientist’s Daughter [Before]

This was back when she still made birds’ nests
with mud and twigs, hoping that birds would
come live in them. She placed them in the crooks
of maple, apple and pear trees, waiting patiently
for them to lay eggs. Her skin was covered in insect bites
and scratches from scrambling over shale and rough bark,
her hair long and tangled.

She wanted to imitate the mockingbird, learned to whistle
for mourning doves. She hid in the honeysuckle
and crept up quietly on foxes and even sometimes
small bears. She still believed she could talk to animals.
She wasn’t afraid then of anything, not the biggest
roaming dogs or the yellowjackets, yet. She prayed
to become one of them—the birds fluttering the leaves,
the cats whose fur she pressed her face into, a wolf
or a jaguar. This was back when she still believed in prayer.

She hid underneath the wide shadows of leaves.
She lay in the moss and broke violet stems with her fingers,
brought the violets and mosses indoors, where they wilted.

This was before she became afraid of light.

WRITE YOUR POEM:

to know the meaning of the word thymus
know what it is exactly
how it functions in the body—
two lobes of tissue

under the body’s heart

―Esther Altshul Helfgott

In Listening to Mozart Esther mimics the tanka a feudal Japanese form of the more accepted waka.  It was a courtly love poem, utilized somewhat like the courtiers poetry of Shakespeare's time.  For our modern age, it would seem strange, but this cultural standard came into being when the emperor Go-Tobu commissioned a monumental anthology.  The strange part is that there was a Bureau of Poetry in their governmental system.  This was the feudal shogun system that soon met its demise.

Do we have a Bureau of Poetry?  How much does our external world drive our poetry? Jeannine comments on just how fragile life and innocence remain, no matter what they age.  Why do you put pen to page?  Love?  Observation?  Introspection?  Write your poem and then make another copy for your compost.  Maybe the flavor will reappear in your tomatoes.