Poets Salon: Dreaming of Freedom

POETS SALON

Illumination (Photo – Kathabela Wilson)

– 02/23/22

Hosted by Kathabela Wilson

above our heads
below the surface
everything we ever wanted

~ Kathabela

Ο Ο Ο

Cycads in Strorrier Stearns Japanese Garden. Drawing by Robert Stewart

Joy McCall

Dreams of freedom

I was a young girl and had not yet been in love.
The gypsy fair came to our town, with noise, and music and bustle.
I tried the games, throwing small balls at moving metal ducks. I found I did it well enough to win a prize – a plastic bag of goldfish.
I ran home and my mother put the four golden fish in a dish bowl and we named them John, Paul, George and Ringo. (Of course I loved the Beatles back then).
The next day I skipped school and went to the field where the gypsies had their camp.

I stood on the gate
watching the caravans
and horses
and children playing
in the sunshine

The women and men were dressed in bright coloured clothes.
Camp fires were burning.

how I longed
to leave school and home
and run away
with the gypsy boys
wild and free

The beautiful goldfish lived a long time, and I came to the end of my school years.
When I left home to move to America, I set the fish free into the village pond.

freedom
has dangers and risks
for fish
and for all creatures
…and for me

Ο Ο Ο

Storrier-Stearns Japanese Garden – Pasadena (Photo – Kathabela Wilson)

James Haddad

lightning plays about
dancing wherever
it wants

falling across the sky

shouting where it wants
to the old gods, maybe

Ο

they glide, like phantoms
through the water
going down stream

their shadows
on the rocks below

silently whistling

Wind Borne – 18″x22″ – Acrylic+Collage/Board, 2016 by Toti O’Brien

Toti O’Brien

ISLAND

I understood. Finally.

First, the smell of the sea. Then the smell of fish, so intense that along with the smell of bread it meant life itself. Then the fragments of rope, the consistency of the sail, so sheer in the light, so solid to the touch.

I understood the sense of abandonment and where it came from. The terror of losing the one I loved most, each time that he left. The uncertainty of his return. And the worship of the boat shielding him from the elements, bringing him home unscathed, once again.

Now I knew why the harbor, the lighthouse, the foghorn had such appeal. I had been the fisherman’s wife before, as were my mother, my mother’s mother. Yes, yes, all the way back. Deep into the memory of the island, buried by the sand and pebbles I trod on as a child, while I stared into a blueness only whispering freedom and possibilities, silent about its secret essence.

I had not learned, yet, how to spell the word loss.

But it was engraved in my cells, soaked my arteries and veins. It just needed to unspool like a fishing line from its reel, my heart hooked at its tip. My heart already harpooned, quietly bleeding.

Ο

Dreaming of Freedom: Notes and Credits

Joy McCall lived much of her life in the United States and Canada. She now lives in the ancient city of Norwich, England, where she was born. She has written and published many books of tanka, and published in many anthologies and journals. She has been a regular contributor to Atlas Poetica, a Journal of World Tanka, for many years.

James Haddad is owner of the Storrier Stearns Garden in Pasadena, where he hosts and participates in Poets on Site meetings once a week.

Toti O’Brien is a Pasadena area writer, artist and performer. See her website for the great variety of her creative work. Her recent books, in her terms 2021, An Alphabet of Birds, 2020, and Other Maidens, 2020, and others previous, are outspoken and lyrical, full of with powerful and profound insight into our human condition.

Memory Lane
> You will love to visit, with Gary Wilson, Tom Clausen, Olivier Schopfer and Karla Decker, the beauty of our related salon in 2019, "Mystery House."

Submission Guidelines

Suggest your own theme. or write Kathabela for a theme suggestion. We publish every two weeks. Send short poems, free verse, haiku, senryu, tanka, cherita, haibun, tanka prose, short prose poems, etc., or your own unique approach, to Kathabela by text message or (click here to email her directly). We can feature your work again after five months. Multiple Submissions can be saved to appear later:

1. Send a short bio, with comments on your theme.
2. Send photos or artwork by you, or friends.
3. Put your poems directly in the email.
4. No attachments except photos.

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