Poets Salon: Fairytale

POETS SALON

– 10/16/19

Little People and their World (fairy folk,) jewelry art by Kath Abela Wilson

Hosted by Kath Abela Wilson

It was half her lifetime ago when she discovered it. When she melted gold or silver with a tiny flame, a sphere was born. For a long time she called them Poetic and Musical Designs. After fifteen years she began to give them bodies, heads, arms and sometimes wings. Fairy folk, each one different and each carried a little scroll that said

little people
and their world
perhaps
they fed on
ticket punch snippets

~ Kath Abela

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Train windows, Portugal Tomar to Lisbon, 2016 (Photo – Kath Abela Wilson)

Alice Pero

The Mystery of the Tiny Pieces of Paper

On the train into the city and don’t even want to put pen to paper. Want to glide, wrap all my parcels in gilt paper and set them in the sun to shine. Don’t want to schlepp one more night into the city. But here I am. The conductor punches my ticket and little bits of paper fall onto my coat. Tiny ticket leavings disappear onto the floor. The train is full of comings and goings and tiny paper leavings. No one notices them. No one knows about them. Tickets are punched and paper falls, but these papers are unknown to anyone. Perhaps tiny people come in the night and collect them for kindling. Perhaps these snippets are the kindling for city fireflies. The fireflies hide under the railroad tracks in winter, where they tend their tiny fires fed by ticket punch snippets. Fairy people recycle them into tiny newspapers and fairy poets hoard them to record epic poems on. None of this is entirely certain, but what is absolutely certain is that no one at all notices the minute particles of paper that fall to the floor of the train car when conductors punch the passengers’ tickets and I doubt very much whether even the custodians of the train pay attention to them as they run their vacuum cleaners over the dusty floors.

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Fairy dust (Photo – Kris Moon Kondo)

Kris Moon Kondo

Fairy dust…
enough to last me
& my granddaughter
from here
to eternity

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After the silk tree fairies’ ballet (Photo – Hazel Hall)

Hazel Hall

after
the silk tree fairies’
ballet
a white cockatoo
leaves its calling card

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Milkweed pods and seeds dropped by fairies (Photo – Tom Clausen)

Fairytale: Quotes and Credits

Alice Pero now lives, writes and makes music in Los Angeles. Some of her prolific outpourings have found their way into literary magazines, some are heard at readings. Her first book “Thawed Stars” was praised by Kenneth Koch as having “clarity and surprises.” She founded the long-running reading series Moonday and the chamber music group, Windsong Players. She says: “In the 80’s and 90’s, I lived in New Jersey near New York City and made frequent trips to the city by train. I wrote many journals during that time. Trains and their accoutrements and occupants as well as what appeared outside the window were themes.”

Kris Moon Kondo, always recording the magic of life and sensitive to the fairy folk, is a mother, new grandmother, artist, poet, and teacher, living by a mountain river in Kyokawa Village in Kanagawa, Japan. She moved there from the USA and Canada in 1972. See her interview with Kath Abela in ColoradoBoulevard.net.

Hazel Hall is a versatile Australian poet and musicologist. Her latest collections are Step by Step, a tai chi collaboration with Angie Egan (Picaro Poets 2019), Moonlight Over the Siding (Interactive Press 2019), and a collection for dog lovers, You are Her Words with Canadian artist Karen Bailey (2019). She says: “We have a little cottage in The Riverina. The silk tree shades our back veranda. My picture was taken just after we’d pruned a few branches, and yes, the cockatoo did call!”

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Flower portrait, rolled fairy scrolls (Photo – Tom Clausen)

♣ A note from Kath Abela

>  The next Moonday, founded and hosted by Alice Pero, will be held Sunday, November 17 at the Flintridge Bookstore.  It will feature Cynthia Anderson and Cindy Rinne. There will also be an Open Reading.  > On October 27 at Bolton Hall, in Sunland Tujunga, there will be a reading of Village Poets. Suzanne Lummis will Receive an Honorary Membership in the California State Poetry Society. There will also be an Open Reading. Both events are free. > Join Kath Abela each Thursday from 1:30 pm to 3:30 pm at Storrier Stearns Japanese Garden for a poetry reading of your own work, writing session inspired by the garden and by Rick Wilson’s playing world flutes. Entrance to the Garden is $10, poets attending the meeting have free entrance at this time. Please join the garden when you can, and read its interesting history.

> You may still send a short poem inspired by Mystery House. Send to Kath Abela by Facebook message or poetsonsite[at]gmail.com.

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