December 2017
Dianna Henning
gammonmackinnon@diannahenning.com
I live in Lassen County on six acres with my husband Kam and malamute Sakari. The trees and mountains inspire me; the solitude nourishes me. I run a workshop Thompson Peak Writers’ Workshop and have taught in prisons and schools. Work published in: The Red Rock Review, The Kentucky Review, The Main Street Rag and other magazines. Nominated for a Pushcart, Blue Fifth Review 2015. My third book Cathedral of the Hand published 2016 through Finishing Line Press. Website: www.diannahenning.com
I wrote this when I was about eight. I didn’t know what “sipid” or “limpid” meant and only years later did I find out their meaning. But I was going purely for sound and the poem really wrote itself at Lake Seymour in Vermont. I used to love to sit by the water and listen to the waves as they washed onto shore. Fortunately, my Scottish grandmother recited poems for me by Poe, Burns and Keats. She imbued the love of poetry within me and she also wrote marvelous poems. I am the keeper of her handwritten poems which are fading as time passes.  In the photo I am about five or six years old.
 

(Untitled) 1950


An apricot sun
announced day had begun
while stretched beneath
the waves mighty teeth
tantalize the skies
 
Kiss the cool
and sipid waters
said the cool
and limpid daughters
 
But the sun neglects
the sun rejects
for the sun is the water and I
but its daughter

​
 


This poem was my very first publication period, and it was in Bandersnatch Feb. 1974 through John Abbott College, Quebec, where I was going to school after a nervous breakdown (breakthrough) and was hospitalized for four months in Pointe Claire, Quebec. Poetry became the very ground I could stand on. It sustained me through a very difficult time.
 

Spider Wind Weave Your Cold

​
I could write a wind story
so colorful
you would stand
white in fright
ghosting beside me
and I beside myself
not knowing how to stabilize
kaleidoscopic hallucinations
and we would become wind blown
ghosting against window panes
wolves whining wind songs
in the otherwise obscurity of night ​
©2017 Dianna Henning
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