Poetry Corner: Life Changing Moments

POETRY CORNER

– 12/28/16

Hosted by Kathabela Wilson

I think these beautiful tanka poems will resonate personally for you as they do for me. The quiet first sight, the word that awakens strong feeling, they are doors that open into a lifetime of deep relationship. Then, the precarious moment, the balance that determines the course of our well being. Here is the power of small poems to hold the energy of life changing experience.

~ Kathabela

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Fishing (Photo – Eve Castle).

Eve Castle

at the lake
dawn finds him fishing
last nights choir
of frogs and cicadas
forgotten —in this stillness

Eve Castle‘s new beginning “story” revolves around her husband. They married in 2013 as a middle-aged couple. In dawn’s light she took of her husband, he and the boat veiled in darkness. It ties closely to how she felt when she found him and fell in love. A beautiful surprise and a new beginning after a long stillness. Eve’s poetry and short stories have been published in Illya’s Honey, The Barbaric Yawp and in Bright Stars. One of her poems was recently included in an anthology of poets located in the Dallas/Fort-Worth area.

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Maestro Impromptu (Photo – Lois P. Jones).

Lois P. Jones

I was reading
Mozart’s biography
on the settee
your eyes sought mine
“Constanze!” you cried.

Lois P. Jones says: “There’s an entire lifetime surrounding this tanka, maybe more, but it was a pivotal experience meeting the man and maestro who would change my life forever and who continues to resonate beyond his passing this year at 93.” Lois lives in South Pasadena. She’s the host of KPFK’s Poets Cafe.​

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Unexpected breach (Photo – Michele L. Harvey).

Michele L. Harvey

today it changed
his life’s trajectory
the small breach
in the tarmac’s surface
which caught his cycle’s wheel

When asked to write a poem on the theme of a life changing moment, the poet Michele L. Harvey thought of one where life passes before one’s eyes. When living and bicycling in Manhattan on a dark winter’s night, her front wheel caught in a construction fissure which crossed the bicycle lane. She fell and fortunately was unscathed. Not so, for a young cyclist friend in a similar situation. (This poem is an amalgam of both incidents.) Michele’s tanka helps us remember to honor small, poignant moments, which build on one another to set our life’s course. Michele L. Harvey spends winter part of the year in Brooklyn, NY and the warmer months in country at Hamilton, NY.

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