Kathryn Kyker visited the Northeast Kingdom!

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