Two poems by Colleen O'Neill

 

The evening light rises

rose colored as the dawn

reaching into the rain grey heavens

    swirling mixed like fingerpaint.

The grey clouds soft as goose down

    billow love.

Somewhere someone's heart is

    full to spilling with joy.

***************       

        

        feeling at home
        grounded and present

body and soul
            and wishing to walk
through the misty moist

Nightfall        to see
    and run from that which is
Not there
        follow the nightbird
            follow the song sweet and
deep in the forest
to the circle of trees
where the sky opens
and the grandmothers speak
in the tongue of the tuathade daman
        wise and wild with spirit

Kathryn Kyker's poem, Lupa

 

Lupa

“…So mastered by the brute blood of the air…”                                                          from Leda and the Swan, Yeats

 

photo by Kathern Kyker taken while in Italy

                                         

They sell them as fertility charms

bright red, flame-shaped objects

like peppers, the hot kind

 

Phalluses freed from ancient Pompeii

just in case you forgot

this is a man’s world

erect, rigid, piercing

 

Innocents fed to lions

nails through whomever for whatever

by the same men who burned women

for being immoral

 

The goddess they admire turned

a victim of rape into a monster

emulating the masculine

she never emasculates

 

See how ugly a woman becomes

when she won’t hide a man’s crime

against her

 

Starved of circles, spirals, wombs

their mother made a nameless wolf

suckling the young boys who

spilt blood across the world

until finally we hear her growl--

 

Now that’s enough.

                                                kk 3/25

				kathryn kyker

Blogger's Note:  Kathryn Kyker lives in Athens, Georgia, but enjoys frequent travel.  She has visited Barton as guest of Adrien Helm and the Wednesday Poets.  We know her also because some of us attend by internet a poetry group in Athens held luckily on the Wednesday we don't meet in Barton.  Her memoir is soon to be published with accounts from her career as a Social Worker.  The title is Surprised by Nothing: Surviving the ER World of Worst-Case Scenarios, published by Girl Friday Productions.