My poetry collection, Every Glittering Chimera, has been selected for publication by the wonderful Blue Light Press and will be published later this fall. Dates and details are still to come, but in the meantime I wanted to share a little preview.
Award winning poet and author of Original Human, Deborah De Nicola calls Every Glittering Chimera:
“In a cadence now urgent, now zen-like, now vehement, now celebratory, Rosalind Brenner’s poems examine the spectrum of loss, motherhood, solitude, companionship, uneasy alliances, and a joy that teeters at times on the rim of despair. Contradictions meet in ‘the realm/where form is born.’ Her words touch the living earth in a seasoned voice that dares to strip itself down to tuber and root. Brenner pines for a return of her ‘fugitive beauty’ while boldly facing ‘the litter of {my} history.’ This is a book where the polyphonic, protean and always female Chimera alternately keens and sings.”
The two poems below are included in the collection.
Beyond the Bones
Now is a garden. Let it blossom in your heart
where atria and oracles meet at the aorta:
vital landscape architects
whose elegant design identifies you.
You are both dreamer and the dream.
What grows is what you plant.
Weeds can proliferate.
Pluck them.
They choke your lilies of the valley,
peonies and knock-out roses.
Edibles too.
You rise early for the berries
to pick them from the vines before the thieves:
birds attracted to the sweet pervasion
of jasmine-fragrant morning air.
The birds invoke
reflection on your first love.
He mingles with your flowers and your sorrow.
Your early species-watcher
who pointed out to you so many
along the journey’s road to here.
Showed you your first painted bunting.
Thoughts of long ago, this morning
on your walk along the pier,
intrude on your present aviary,
where cardinals and orioles appear
and ruby-throated hummingbirds drink nectar.
You pull the encroaching weeds of regret
to trade what was for now.
You bow before the marble Buddha.
Blocked
Another day of stasis, or worse,
backward slide.
Once, I used my hands to fix or build,
to justify each day.
Now I stand awed as this boneyard piles
with the litter of my history.
Then I could unlock bright colors
and lift like a ruby finch against a cobalt sky.
I want to walk again with my familiars
through a gate of multi-dimensional time,
but charcoal stains buffet my sightline.