January 2024
Cordelia Hanemann
korkimax@gmail.com
Bio Note: A retired English Professor, I am rediscovering myself as a botanical illustrator and area poet. I'm active in my Raleigh, NC community where I co-host [Funshop] Summer Poets and stay active with youth poetry in the North Carolina Poetry Society. I've published in numerous journals, in several anthologies including best-selling Poems for Ukraine and a chapbook. I'm now working on a novel about my Cajun roots.

Words Fly Out
Under the hunger of the night sky, black pages of night fly open. I am confused, strangely alone. Words spill into the chaos of my cluttered mind, filled with the din of old worn out stories. Far away, barely visible, a small ribbon of road, mapped by words not merely my own, thought, written, spoken : owned and disowned. The road beckons / turns off into the deeper dark. To find my way, I trace penumbras around trees, unformed shapes cloaked in filigrees of shadow, Fragments of truths strewn across a blank path, confusing and disheartening : what to believe / what to take in / how to mend. What happens when the words fail : strange images at play beyond distinction of light and dark color and no color / edges and no edges. I seem to be waiting, waiting for something : the past come back, to remind, to inform among the stumblings and stutterings. Out of the tumult a kind of ferment, spawning new words to mend what was, to transform what has been into what might be : Words burn upward into day, churning in the eye of morning. I hold within myself their glow : whole sentences race through my head. Memories return still churning; new ideas congeal. I see again or see for the first time what I could not see before.
©2024 Cordelia Hanemann
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