February 2022
Bio Note: The holidays made wonderful memories and our trip to Oregon to be with family members was divine. (Home is always where people love you and accept you for who you are.) Now the little snows are leaving back here in California and still I am warmed with wonderful memories. Slowly, I am beginning the work on a fifth poetry book and was delighted to be nominated for a Pushcart by the Adirondack Review for a poem that drew heavily on my Vermont life and where much of my family still lives.
Wintertime, Bears Become
heavy blankets, asleep
in their tremulous dark,
stoic underneath harboring trees,
or bedded in steel culverts.
**
A bear’s shield-shaped shoulder blades
were once used as sickles
for cutting grass. Cree hunters
lit pipes and blew smoke
down the dead bear’s throat
to calm the future nation of bears.
**
When dogs bark at an eerie strangeness
in the night’s air,
and sleep’s ether assails us,
the bear, shoulders forward, buckles down
in all his synapses of longing.
Sadness as Monday’s Housekeeper
You must pay for what you learn,
a mother tells her daughter,
and holds her breath as her child attends
her first Sophomore prom.
But suppose the entrance fee is too high,
the guy she’s with, the band’s
trumpet player, puts down his horn,
plays her in some back room bereft of sanity,
so dingy with smudged walls, graffiti,
that you want to forewarn her:
Don’t go into that room or you’ll pay
for the rest of your life. But like most things,
warnings won’t keep someone from being tempestuous,
and she’ll pay all right. She’ll pay.
©2022 Dianna MacKinnon Henning
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