Village Poets of Sunland & Tujunga: May Kay Rummel on November 23, 2014

Monday, October 27, 2014

May Kay Rummel on November 23, 2014 - A Poet for Thanksgiving

For Thanksgiving, we have some poetry you will be truly thankful for! Mary Kay Rummel, Poet Laureate of Ventura County, will be our Featured Poet on Sunday, November 23, 2014 at 4:30 p.m. The reading will take place in the Bolton Hall Museum, L.A. Historical Monument No. 2, and a National Historical Landmark, on Commerce St. in Tujunga. We start with a segment of open mike and follow the feature with another open mike segment. We have lots of talented poets and a few local originals, including former Poets Laureate of Sunland Tujunga and the current Poet Laureate, Elsa Frausto.

MARY KAY RUMMEL

Mary Kay Rummel is the first Poet Laureate of Ventura County, CA. Her seventh book of poetry, The Lifeline Trembles, has been published by Blue Light Press of San Francisco as a winner of the 2014 Blue Light Poetry Prize. Recent publications include poems in Nimrod, Pirene’s Fountain, Askew and in the anthologies, Woman in Metaphor by Stephen Linsteadt; Meditations on Divine Names (Moonrise Press); A Bird Black As The Sun (Green Poet Press); and Creativity and Constraint (Wising Up Press).Mary Kay has received four Pushcart nominations, was 2013 winner of the Irish American Crossroads Contest in San Francisco. She teaches part time at California State University, Channel Islands and lives in Ventura. More information: marykayrummel.com.

Burnt Dress

Even in old ageI need you,

your voice a ululation

across a meadow tracked

by the capricious ash grey hare.

Your words sprout

from my heart like mallow.

You tell me to claim

the wildness I once wanted.

Your words, stones

I keep fingering.

Beauty walks this world aging everything—

each colonnade, leaf, sparrow,

lintel, scarf, water bird.

I am an angel in a burnt dress.

I call you now from the square,

stalls hung with yellow roses and handbags.

So much stone here,

astarfall of stained glass.

One egret in a field.

The loneliness

of angels without

even the body of a shadow.

My breath spread so thin

that nothing’s left but bone
white emptiness, whisper of ruins.

Weaving, forever weaving

into and out of this world.

From The Lifeline Trembles

Mary Kay Rummel

California Morning Song

Olive tree bent on the hill,

bathed in expectancy.

Lavender, and white stone.

Sea wind turns the world transparent.

Jade shell

Pink Perfection camellia

water-cuts in sand

mutate on the zigzag border

between wholeness and coming undone.

The horizon a gold line,

broken by tankers and tall ships,

between visible and unseen.

How loneliness ends

though you are far from home.

How a sailor becomes

the oceans she sails across.

From The Lifeline Trembles

Mary Kay Rummel

At each Village Poets Monthly Reading we pass the George Harris hat - to collect $3 per person for refreshments and to donate to the Little Landers Historical Society for the upkeep of the Bolton Hall Museum. Here's George in his hat, and a poet's hat...