Marilyn Kallet

Letters from Earth & Sky
January 22, 2021 Kallet Marilyn

Letters from Earth & Sky

 

Petals
on the earth
and William Stafford
say it best:
You are not alone.
The dogwoods
stand, jays screech
improv
with the hawks.
Yesterday,
the neighbors’
black Lab
came racing by
for a caress,
and you could hear
your own
shameless
heart.

So wrap yourself in
hope & a mask
and walk¬¬––greet
that family at
the end
of the block.

Silky
petals
drop
like divine notes,
& no one
gets
hurt––be
like that,
soft,
kind.

Read that tiny
ant-memo, crawling
on your glasses
while you write:
You are not alone.

Rimbaud
was wrong: I
is not “someone else.”
I is all of us,
on a stroll to meet
the new, the guileless,
and the oldest
blossoming trees––

long-flowering ones
we yearn to sing
& become.

Marilyn Kallet is Knoxville Poet Laureate, and has published 18 books, including How Our Bodies Learned, The Love That Moves Me, and Packing Light: New and Selected Poems, Black Widow Press. She has translated Paul Eluard’s Last Love Poems and Benjamin Péret’s The Big Game. Dr. Kallet is Professor Emerita at the University of Tennessee. She leads a writing residency for the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, in Auvillar, France. She has performed her poems across the United States as well as in France and Poland, as a guest of the U.S. Embassy’s “America Presents” program. Her poetry appeared recently in New Letters and is forthcoming in North American Review’s “Open Space,” and in New Voices, an anthology of contemporary voices on antisemitism.