Vera Ignatowitsch – Three Poems


 

Fidget Spinner

Becoming bored beyond
boundaries choose myriad things
to investigate. Search

shadowed faces meandering
slyly in thick summer foliage.
Select the best one to kiss

on the eyelids when they blink
into focus, then fade. In the pavement
lurk whispering gems to design

into jewelry. That puddle
shines rings psychedelic as acid
trip. Stir it. Down watching

the shoes of pedestrians,
plot their proclivities. Choose one
to dance with. Pirouette

with the birds sitting watching
you, ready to fly into poetry.
A child stuffed with longing

you wander eternity renewed
every moment, flying free, whirling
wild as a fidget spinner.


 

Ancient Love

Above us now the first leaves turn
to glowing orange red and gold.
Tight as a spasm my heart contracts,
a cellular remembering.
Your aura permeates my mind.

How many years
can love unanswered resonate
an endless echo through the soul,
is it enchantment?
or a dye indelible?

My heart must look an ancient tree
with rings that mark time and events.
No memory is ever lost,
perhaps not even beyond death.
Time stretches far beyond our sight.
Old loves encircled by the new
still live within.

The seasons turn in ancient places too.


 

Dangerous Blessings

Like a cat my bliss parts
the grass of my garden,
each nerve, every muscle
restrained to defend,
in a swoop saves my joy,
never tamed, unencumbered,
from the crest of abandon.

I dig up the earth.

With a will my spade carves
its orderly furrows,
makes safe for my seedlings
the wild seething earth;
but my soul stays a feline
untrained and unruly.

Be silent my secrets.


 

Author’s Statement on Beauty

Beauty is everywhere. We just have to look for it. Those who seek it, and seek to transform or distill it into even greater beauty, through the arts and through poetry, form, I believe, a special relationship to beauty. It becomes an element that is an almost physiological part of the person, and I believe that this happens also for those who simply seek it to acknowledge and appreciate it.

We all have favorite artists and poets, and mine appear to work a kind of alchemy, whether they use words, pigment, thread or any other materials, which results in the equivalent of a fine old whiskey or brandy distilled skillfully from fruits of the earth into a complex and heady experience. Some of this alchemy also is practiced by anyone who prepares a mouth-watering meal, or breeds an exquisitely beautiful flower. It gives us all the things in life that raise it beyond mere drudgery.

Poetry, for me, is a passionate expression of things we sense, see, know (even if not consciously), in a concentrated form that sounds like a passage of never before heard music. Beauty is fashioned from the melodies and harmonies all around us that we don’t usually listen to or hear, condensed and crystallized into something potent and also elemental.

“The poet doesn’t invent. He listens.” – Jean Cocteau


 

Vera Ignatowitsch is addicted to poetry, raspberries, and an occasional fine scotch. Her poems have been published in The Lyric, San Pedro River Review, New Verse News, and Tuck Magazine.