Since this posting of September 15, Kathryn has sent two more recent poems. They follow Buttons of Resistance. One has to do with turning 60, and another with the new restrictions on reproductive choice. She's surprised to have written two poems with rhyme, but we don't mind.
Kathryn is currently finishing a memoir of her many years serving as an Emergency Room Social Worker.
 |
| Kathryn, Sept. 12, 2022, Barton VT |
 |
| Kathryn took this picture of our gathering for lunch (thanks to Adrien Helm,in foreground). Others, clockwise, Ellen Mass, Judith Janoo, Mark Creaven, Sylvia Manning, Stephen Hickey |
Sing a Song of Sixty August 2022, kk
Sing a song of sixty
A pocketful of seeds
Sprinkled through the years
Examine all your deeds
When your life is over
Are there fledging sprouts
Trust that what you’ve tended
Exceeds your piddling doubts.
Sing a song of sixty
A body in decline
Summon all your lessons
Watch the stars align
When the show is over
You’ll rest in mother earth
Bequeathing all your riches
Entice the ground to birth.
Sing a song of sixty
So much yet to do
You never held a dewdrop
Or made a daisy stew
When the day is over
And you lie down in bed
Will your thoughts be settled
Or whirling round instead?
Sing a song of sixty
A pocketful of seeds
Sprinkled through the years
Examine all my deeds
When the year is over
I won’t know what’s to come
Life remains a mystery
When I’m sixty-one.
We Are All Handmaids Now* by kk 7/22
Excuse me, please
It’s hard to breathe
This corset binding me
As I try to see
My foot on the edge
Teetering on this ledge
Falling into the place
Where freedom has no space.
Excuse me, please
It’s hard to breathe
Your hand on my throat
And I’m having to tote
The deaths of now and then
For what you call sin
As if we do it alone—
It takes two to bone.
Excuse me, please
It’s hard to breathe
Stench on the land
Is this the plan
Make us scurry
Our lives turn slurry
trying to mitigate
Your fist in our fate?
Excuse me—
for not saying please
It’s hard to breathe
Falling into the place
Where freedom has no space.
* Margaret Atwood, author of A Handmaiden’s Tale
September 15, 2022:
We had opportunity to meet Kathryn in real life! Adrien held a reception at her Greater Barton Arts this last Monday, September 12, 2022. We've grown to admire Kathryn as a poet and a person by benefit of Zoom meetings of the poetry group in Athens, Georgia that some of our Barton Wednesday Poets have been able to attend.
The poem below is not brand new. I found it in older posts; it was written in July of 2020. Kathryn, if you see this, send us a new poem to post along with this one. (But this one is as relevant now as ever, so it's a prize to reprise.)
Thank you for coming all this way. Thank you for your poetry.
Buttons of Resistance
|
| Kathryn, Sept. 12, 2022, Barton VT |
Before I was a mom I knew—
You Can’t Hug Children With Nuclear Arms.
The simple lesson—
Violence Ends Where Love Begins—
lost to me in a marriage where the two
ran into each other and got hopelessly blurred.
A whale smirked Save The Humans—
a sweet delusion so we could forget—
that every creature would be happy to see us go.
(except maybe dogs)
A Good Planet Is Hard To Find, Don’t Dump Toxic Waste, and
Social Justice—almost an obligatory afterthought—
all packed away when new men came to power and
EVERYTHING
was going to change except it didn’t—
except me.
COEXIST, my lazy bumpersticker nod of compromise
to a status quo tangled by intolerance.
Recycle Yourself, a snarky keychain plea
for organ donation—
one of the last things I believed in.
But no peace activist could fail to rise again on January 2017
except…no, even the dead ones.
I wore a pin of Obama’s words on a hat made by a woman on a bus
from my hometown, with two shades of pink and tiny ears.
Of all the inspired expressions from that sea of women,
Princess Leia’s banner ruled:
her hair plastered in cinnamon-bun swirls, a tunic you can fight in, boots—because
you never know how long you’re going to be on your feet in a rebellion, or who
you might need to kick—and
a light saber to show the way—
A Woman’s Place Is In The Resistance
accept no exceptions:
Resist
giving up your power by making yourself small
Resist
surrendering choice quietly
Resist
the lull of fatigue, the luxury of distraction
And maybe
Despair Ends Where Hope Begins.
kk 6/2020
