Good morning everyone,
I hope you enjoyed all the recent holidays and are looking forward to many more happy days to come.
Our poet today is one whose work I very much admire.
PD Pin received an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and worked as the Programs Director at The Mount, author Edith Wharton’s home, a National Historic Landmark and literary center in western Massachusetts. In partnership with the Straw Dog Writers Guild, where she serves as the Executive Consulting Director, Pin helped establish an Emerging Writers Residency at The Mount, now in its fifth year. Her favorite extracurricular activity is teaching kids (ages 5-12) karate–a practice in humility and stand-up comedy.
Below are three of her recent poems.
Perhaps, the World
~after Joy Harjo
The world begins with gravity, keeps our bodies and celestial objects
orbiting the sun. No matter, we must have gravity
to live.
The properties of gravity are invisible
like fear or love
a force catching seemingly disparate things, what holds them on the ground,
and what makes them fall on their knees.
We chase the moon, its call caressing the seas, counting cycles of tides
marked by seasons and tallying years
left to live.
It is here in the helical murmuration of moon, sun, and a pale blue dot
where our actions ebb and flow, where consequence is a nonsensical equation.
Wars have begun and ended with gravity. We have given simultaneous
birth to Himmler and Tosca, Apollo’s lunar walk, and Woodstock.
We must wonder at the axial tilt of our fit survival.
This is our grace and grave–
Our gravity.
Ghazal with Pin Holes
He should have said as if regulating tension on an instrument–put a pin
in it. I spy a hole in the green of this imaginary love story like a pin
topping the staff, a pole with a flag waving victory or surrender.
Love is like that–sports or history–fickle, one-sided, shouting silences, it pins
down and dissects once living creatures, wings unfolded, preserved
under glass, displayed and recorded as proof of something long in dying; a pin
on a map marking the undiscovered country of requited love.
Silence signifies something in a world connected by webs. I pin
my ignorant optimism on the nonexistent future to arrive–
one of fraternity, safety, that cushions and rests on a pin
of restraint; someone once said, Pin, rejection is redirection–an invitation
to wonder, who are you without love mirrored? Let that be your PIN.
My Valentines
~after Millay
Who my lips have kissed, when, and why,
is a mystery misremembered, and let me not forget
the illusory spectacle of breath and contentment
evaporating after summer droughts. But the winter
wind tonight unhinges long-dead leaves that splinter
a cautious heart’s hibernation.
Is love in the air (again),
or is it a pink-marketed plastic fever?
In February, Cupid arms himself with infantile
arrows for the army of St. Valentine,
the patron saint of epilepsy and bees.
Red roses, chocolate, a hand-drawn heart–the holy signs
of love, indulgence, a Pompeian symbol for a brothel.
Give me a book, a dog, and time alone. Please.
Irene Willis,
Poetry Editor