FEATURED POET: Betty Scott is a poet and essayist. In the 1980’s she wrote a bimonthly column about family life for The Wenatchee World and this began her writing career.
She was born in Santa Barbara, CA, and earned a BA in English Literature from UCLA, a teaching certificate from Central Washington University and a MA in English with a writing emphasis from Western Washington University.
As a longtime board member for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) of Whatcom County, she provided education and support for people encountering the complexities of our costly mental health system and for those who have lost loved ones to suicide.
A former instructor at Whatcom Community College and Bellingham Technical College, Scott devotes her retirement years to writing and editing. She has several manuscripts waiting for publication.
In her collaboration with singer, songwriter JP Falcon Grady, Scott searches for social systems that lead to nurturing and protecting children, adults and the earth. Together they perform poems that support bio diversity, as the earth’s blue print for its land, air, and water. Beneath human constructs of science, politics, sports, philosophy, business, and religion is an abiding energy, a living spirit, often described as love, faith, forgiveness and generosity. In her poems, Scott imagines how a diversity of human responses can lead to a healthier planet. When they perform together, JP Falcon Grady sings the italicized parts of her poems.
An Earth Year Blessing was previously published in Noisy Water: Poetry from Whatcom County, Washington, edited by Luther Allen & J.J. Kleinberg.
The Playground was presented to participants at the 2013 Chuckanut Writers Festival in Bellingham.
AN EARTH YEAR BLESSING
No man a salt
shaker
No woman a sugar
bowl
To pour, use up
And put out to
pantry
No more darting of
eyes
Or senator sneers
When Mama’s Boys
pilgrim
To Great Mama’s pastures
To dance, step by
step
With maternal
wisdoms
To tango and waltz
Arms and heads in
precision
Each footfall a
grace
Restoring Earth’s
faith
Mama’s troupes
swaying
Singing and
praying:
Single Mama, Widowed Mama,
Earthly image of Great Mama
Hallowed be your name
Holy Sustainer of Life
Your people tend on you
Beloved Great Mama
On earth as we hope in heaven.
―Betty Scott
THE PLAYGROUND
In writing, it’s a
well-known fact:
letters are lizards
with legs and tails
syllables bite like
alligator teeth
and words blossom
like magnolia trees.
No lie: in swamps
and fields, the wind strokes
and ripples the
tiniest wild flower
that under the
light of a microscope
lives as complex as
an orchid or rose.
It’s a fact: the
cells of grasses and leaves
resemble living
streams and arteries.
In marshes, hollow
reeds are fiddle strings
that shadow the
shallows and hallowed-winged.
It’s the truth:
people swarm, sip, and worship
our playgrounds
during festival seasons
as the heirs to
brass notes float, fall, and rise
beneath the gumbo
of moon and moonshine.
While the infinite
and minuscule breed
while lizards,
swamps and birds battle to breathe
the heated U.S.
is rooted and twined
to nature’s rhythms
and rhymes. Who rests?
―Betty Scott
WRITE YOUR POEM
It’s the truth: people swarm, sip, and worship
our playgrounds during festival seasons
As Daylight savings pops up and people swarm malls like ants on a doughnut where do you find yourself with the poem? People who love words find time and watch the people in the mall. What do you do? Is there just that one gesture? That one phrase?
We have cell phones to take pictures. We need poets to write the words. Write your poem!
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