Blue Heron Speaks - Featured Poet

I'm thrilled and honored to be the  Featured Poet in the September Issue of Blue Heron Speaks. This wonderful online poetry journal has a goal of presenting "messages of inspiration, support, and nourishment for the soul."And they really do offer heart-centered poems that speak to seekers after beauty and peace. My three poems include the title poem from my forthcoming collection, Arabesque. An excerpt from the poem treats the word "arabesque" in its other meaning, a calligraphic figure:

In Ugarit they baked their dictionaries,
clay tablets incised with punctures and points,
arched and tented words. The idea of reading
marks may have come from the leaves’
dancing shadows. This morning the tree’s
shadows script moving letters on my wall.
Likeness is our essential speech.
Shapes echo others. The eye is a leaf
and its own tear. A preying mantis
profiles a priest. Clouds coil,
and we are all walking texts
waiting to be read.

Another poem in this trio, "At the Inn of the Sea", anticipates the way the world is becoming, if you look beyond the headlines and surface appearances:

Here at the summer inn,
the physical world bursts
out wild every day. As if evil
is just an aberrant weed
in a vast undersea forest
that can consume every quirk and blip.
I stand silent before a hydrangea’s
blue symmetry, its sphere of birth
implying an epoch to begin fresh,
a world as heavenly as it always
meant to be, and mine becoming
a more celestial body.

My novel, The Renaissance Club, is a love story about a contemporary time traveler going back to 17th century Italy to meet her artist hero, sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini. It will be published by Fiery Seas Publishing in January 2018. 

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