P.D. PIN
Good morning, everyone. Happy (we hope) Fourth of July, here in the good old U.S.A., in a year when we’re all worried about whether we still have a
democracy. The good news today is that we’re finally getting somewhere with our gun laws — a bipartisan result that means we’re also finally getting somewhere with bi-partisanship.
Enough about that. Now it time for the healing of our souls with poetry. Our poet this morning is a brand-new one with a modest publishing history but a fascinating background.
P.D. Pin was born and raised in southwestern Ontario. Her parents moved to Canada before she was born from Friuli, Italy, a region bordering Austria and Slovenia. She lived in several places, like Milan, Italy, St. John’s, Newfoundland and Toronto, Ontario before moving to Western Massachusetts in 2011.
She has an undergraduate degree from the University of Western Ontario in London and a Master of Fine Arts in poetry and translation from Vermont College. Since 2014 she has worked at The Mount, Edith Wharton’s homestead in Lenox, MA; first as a docent, then as bookstore manager, and currently as Public Programs Director.
Currently she is at work on several novels, a children’s book about her dog Pip, and a new poetry manuscript. The poems we’re delighted to share with you today are from her graduate creative thesis and are published here for the first time.
Following are three poems by P.D. Pin:
Messiah
Understudy
Body Language
–Irene Willis
Poetry Editor
Messiah
Modern man prays
to him, while neurologists
study brain fMRIs, speech and
optic centers alight as if
he was a friend
sitting across the table,
coffee in hand, listening.
As if man created
God, so he could say
God created him—
in his image.
Understudy
She wakes each morning a vacant stage
with thoughts like actors in wings for cues
waiting: some well-versed in words,
others, in art of improvisation and,
with alarming dexterity, they change
multiple costumes, multiple masks
with which to play the art of comedy,
and tragedy. They mark her,
the followspot tracking,
for an opening. From the catwalk
the understudies stalk,
apocryphal thespians, her insecurity.
Body Language—
after Szymborska
In a tongue foreign to ears,
it speaks without words,
saying nothing, imagining everything:
it feeds, digests, expels; it sexes, it sleeps.
Like a shred of gale,
silence measured in hertz and volts it
cycles, immeasurably, toward self-nihilism.