Poetry Corner: Childhood Haunts

POETRY CORNER

– 7/27/16

♣ We welcome and encourage your response especially in the form of short poems. You may reply by leaving a comment below.

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Winter by Toti O’Brien: “I was born in the town where She-Wolf adopted twin boys. I’m a She-Wolf daughter myself. Wilderness is my motherland.”

Alice Pero

Riding on the back
of my thoughts
I bend the world sideways
to see flowers
with the right colors

There is no reason
to move anywhere
I see that magic horse
who invites me in stillness
to forever

Alice Pero grew up in the countryside of New York State. She would take long walks in the fields, bury herself in the long grass of the hillsides, talking in a secret language to her dog, Josie, oblivious to the world elsewhere. Now living in Sunland, CA., she visits upstate NY every year, and says “this is one of my favorite subjects and I am now sitting in the room I slept in as a child in the cottage in the country with the fresh summer breeze coming in the window.”

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The Trees Are Asleep by Cindy Rinne: “A childhood haunt was the woods behind my backyard. It was a scary place and forbidden. When I returned as an adult, I saw the forest wasn’t very thick or scary.”

Erwin Endress

Here, when on the flowered hills
stole December
swayed the nation’s fleet upon the bays
Here was hope and here the gentle hearts
of boys, playing with their sleds
along hillsides on the coasts of home.
Here when on the flowered hills
stole December
and the snows lay deep and silent
on New England,
war burst down,
and the little boys laughed,
and went away.

Erwin Endress
Hawai, 1942

Erwin Endress is Kathabela’s father, a poet and journalist. This poem was published in 1945, in the Staten Island Advance, a daily local newspaper, where he later became a reporter and featured writer.

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Watercolor painting on paper, 4 h x 6w, original study by Sigrid Saradunn (c) 2015.

Sigrid Saradunn

summer treat
ride up the “mountain”
Grand Dad’s Bluff
climbing rocks children’s challenge
parents cringe but take photos

Sigrid Saradunn says ” Down East Maine, where I live now, reminds me so much of Northern Wisconsin where I lived until I was ten. Grand-Dad’s Bluff, on Bliss Road, is in La Crosse, WI, on the Mississippi, 6 miles from where my grandparents lived and I can still remember looking out. Times were different then. We could roam and play all day.”

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> The Poetry Corner is hosted by Kathabela Wilson. She will be visiting her own childhood haunts this weekend in NYC including Staten Island, where she was born and lived her childhood. It’s the first time she has gone back to that area since 1976.. She recently found this poem by her father in an envelope marked with her mother’s handwriting and addressed to “Kathabela.”

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*Kathabela and Rick are pleased to announce  a new show, “Secret Essence,” by Cindy Rinne and Toti O’Brien. It will open on August 18 in Living Room Gallery, near Caltech in Pasadena, and to be viewed by appointment. Alice Pero and Toti O’Brien have performed together, flute and voice in Alice’s group, Windsong, so her writing for Toti is especially poignant.