June 2023
Bio Note: I'm recovering from a dark time following COVID in January and finally working on a manuscript of poems inspired by women authors and poets who have become muses for my poetry. This poem is a tribute to two women who helped me understand dragons. I've also been giving some readings from my new collection One Bent Twig (Future Cycle Press, 2023) , poems about trees I've planted, love and worry about due to climate change.
O To Be a Dragon
After Marianne Moore and Anne McCaffrey I want to fly as wind or dreams, soar over ballfields, parking lots and hermit paths up foggy mountains – on wings soft of feather, slippery with scales – with these blizzard buzzards, dragons sun-bleached to silver who urge wishes into windsocks. Invisibles who sling splinters of lightning and drape auroras, smell futility in the death smoke of war, these beings with as many names as the aristocracy of angels. Flames in mouth flare knowing an alphabet of authority, burn, and barbecue to torch threads that bind outdated marriages, lost nations and bad intentions. Such slow motion of eyelids. I admire sea drakes coiled on high cliffs obsessed with observing the sinuous reeling of wolf eels in kelp forests. Who stir tidepools with shrill, lift mist on wing loads. Who cross oceans without thought for boundaries, seeding what rains fall as hail or hell-floods. Children do not draw dragonkind in innocent art. We come wired to fear snake, falcon, and roaring cats. We do not revere the oversight of ferocious justice. Of love that mates on sky wings in loops and caprices. Observe hints – dragonflies that hover like news helicopters over dense traffic or snatch moths that hover at summer’s streetlights. Be as certain of dragons as you are of angels and weather balloons. Salt in your eye, the wild fly.
©2023 Tricia Knoll
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