Matryoshka

"Matryoshka" from my first collection, Lines of Flight, is based on a true story. It is one of my most reprinted sonnets, appearing in 14 by 14, Sonnetto Poesia, Soundzine, Writings, and Better Than Starbucks.  

 

Matryoshka

 

 

What made me buy the nested Russian doll

whose faded paint and fractured wooden frame

had doomed her to a yard sale? Had her fall

from grace inspired a longing to reclaim

for her, for fifty cents, some lost esteem?

Or would the curious plaything prove to be

a conversation piece? No, it would seem

I brought the pregnant outcast home for me.

 

For women I had tried so long to trace,

Matryoshka was a tangible motif;

same yet separate, I knew the face,

gave up each grievance, sanctioned every grief.

Restored, they stand here, echoing one another –

mother, daughter, mother, daughter, mother.

 

 

 

 

My sonnet, "Vermont Passage" was inspired by poet Deborah Warren's remark to me about the hillside clover in Vermont, and also by my impressions of the wildflowers along route 89 upon my first visit to Newburyport, Massachusetts. I would eventually take part in Powow River Poets workshops, readings, the Newburyport Literary Festival in 2018, and as a featured reader at the Edna St. Vincent Millay event in 2019.

 

Vermont Passage

 

For Deborah Warren

 

Wildflowers thrive and form, in mid-July,

a buoyant blue and gold receiving line

the length of Interstate Route 89,

as if to welcome friends and passers-by.

But high up in the hillside meadow teems

a purple floret whose divine perfume

makes one forget that roses are in bloom –

mellifluous, the stuff of summer dreams.

 

And when Vermont’s Green Mountains turn to white,

when northern folk see little of the sun,

before the sugar maple sap can run,

when better days attend each bitter night,

I breathe in honeyed memories of clover,

and winter, for a while at least, is over.

 

Drought

 

 

 

 

 

 

I wrote this poem after witnessing the drought in my friends' fields in Argentina. Click HERE for more information on the drought.

"Drought" has been published in Able Muse Journal, Able Muse Anthology, Passages, and Poetry Storehouse. It is included in my first book, Lines of Flight.

 

Drought

 

Above our field of stunted corn and thistle,

a lone chimango circles, scouts, homes in

as sure and swift and savage as a missile,

pins down a leveret, rips away its skin,

 

ignores the terror-stricken eyes, the squeal,

devours the pulsing heart. His thirst now slaked,

he leaves the rest for a carancho’s meal.

The land is quivering, crumbling, cracked and caked,

 

the stream a silent checkerboard of mud,

the well near dry. I pray this lack of water

won’t leave me stony at the sight of blood,

of rational, inexorable slaughter.

 

 

 

(Pueblitos, Argentina - near the town of Saladillo, 2009)

Note: the chimango is a common raptor in southern South America; the carancho is a carrion-eating bird, also native to that region. 

 

A chimango