June 2015
Originally from Queens, New York, I live in West Philadelphia, where I founded the Red Sofa Salon & Poetry Workshop. I was selected by Adrienne Rich as a recipient of a National Writers Union Poetry Prize and have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. I am the author of the chapbook The Apparatus of Visible Things (Finishing Line Press). My poetry is published in Narrative, Alaska Quarterly Review, Drunken Boat, Linebreak, The Nervous Breakdown, and other literary journals, and in The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry. I hold an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.
The Attainable Border of Birds
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“Beyond this sea is a continent, but beyond this continent is another sea, and beyond that sea is the attainable border of the birds. Here the solid sky falls down, striking against the earth, rebounding, a gate that never ceases its opening and closing." -Chukchi myth
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In winter the birds fly
To the place where the sky’s
Jaw drops and lifts, down and up, daily.
On the other side is a country of birds
Where a pelican sips tea with an albatross,
And a petrel rests in the shade of a whooping crane’s wing.
All day they flap and splash
And make cupcakes out of fish.
It’s the birds’ party: no other animals allowed.
They babble in their languages,
Never mention the ones who didn’t make it
To the other side, who stayed on Earth
Caught in the gate’s closing.
They flap against the hem of Earth’s skirt.
But the sky comes down so quick.
To the place where the sky’s
Jaw drops and lifts, down and up, daily.
On the other side is a country of birds
Where a pelican sips tea with an albatross,
And a petrel rests in the shade of a whooping crane’s wing.
All day they flap and splash
And make cupcakes out of fish.
It’s the birds’ party: no other animals allowed.
They babble in their languages,
Never mention the ones who didn’t make it
To the other side, who stayed on Earth
Caught in the gate’s closing.
They flap against the hem of Earth’s skirt.
But the sky comes down so quick.
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Author's Note: Epigraph and italicized lines are quoted from Northern Tales: Traditional Stories of Eskimo and
Indian Peoples, selected and edited by Howard Norman (University of Nebraska Press, 2008), pp. 243–244. |
The Path to the Bench in Snow
We listen to the river crack
In the sudden sun
The snow is deeper than we thought
Up to our knees
Each footprint a well
From which we draw the words we need.
The path to the bench in snow
Must be imagined
And the mind must follow
The ice to its core.
It tells its millennial story
To those with instruments to listen.
We sit at the bench and look around
At this place that we know and don’t.
Pristine mound of unprinted snow.
©2015 Hila Ratzabi