Inspired by Marie Ponsot’s poem “What Speaks Out.”
The best ones require more than quick study.
You must dissect them
Separate the wheat from the chaff.
They demand you step inside their rooms.
Linger with your glass of sentiment.
Right after you find the right
Magnification from the porcelain bowl of readers
On the bottom shelf of the cabinet,
beneath the reclining Italian bottle of red.
Until it makes you sob alone in your bed.
Because what speaks out does not shout or flail its massive tangle of strings.
Instead, it lulls you into abstinence with a Mesopotamian instrument
Four thousand years old. Making you wonder if the boar was, in fact, a bull? Or if the era when music began, ended
much too swiftly for that tall trio of females,
Two singers and one lutist, crushed by the algorithm of the prevailing dead royal.
…
Published by
C. S. De Dona
Author, Poet, Photographer, domestic violence survivor, and naturalized immigrant, Cornelia is currently an Arts and Letters member of The Southwest Florida Branch of The National League Of American Pen Women.
Cornelia lived in Kaneohe, Hawaii, for thirty-six years. Also, seven years in the Mid-Hudson Valley of New York. She now resides in North Fort Myers, Florida.
Her poems and photography are published in print, online, and in Rain Bird, a literary and art journal of the University of Hawaii's Windward Community College (2008-2013).
In 2013, Cornelia received Rain Bird's Kolokolea Poetry Prize for her poem, "Speaking French."
In 2016, her chapbook "Hawaiian Time," entered in the National League of American Pen Women's Vinnie Ream contest, was awarded third place in their inaugural multi-discipline category.
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