Guest Author
Adele Kenny - Author and Poet
This
When you walk to the edge of all the light you have … you
must believe that one of two things will happen: there will be something solid
for you to stand upon, or, you will be taught how to fly.
—
Patrick Overton
The air is luminous, rare—I sit on
the old stone bench that was my mother’s and think of her pearls—the
fragile string—how everything rolled into a crack between the wall and
floorboards. Call it loss.
Pine boughs fill with the sound of
shelled sea waves—sparrows at the feeder, crickets in the ivy. Sound over
sound, and bees humming. On the fence beside me, a spider’s web is strung with
dust. A cricket jumps across my shadow. I hold my breath for a second (a way of
stopping time for something perfect).
Everything that needed to be done is
done. All shall be well, and all
shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. *
The branch above me trembles after a
bird for which I have no name; the bird turns and becomes the sky. This is the
way your eyes take in the light, the way you clear the ruins—this is what
saves you.
* Julian of Norwich
Adele Kenny is the author of the recently published poetry collection What Matters (Welcome Rain Publishers, 2011).
Adele Kenny is the author of twenty-three books (poetry & nonfiction) with poems published in journals worldwide, as well as in books and anthologies from Crown, Tuttle, Shambhala, and McGraw-Hill. A former creative writing professor in the College of New Rochelle’s Graduate School, she is founding director of the Carriage House Poetry Series and poetry editor of Tiferet Journal. Among other awards, she has received two poetry fellowships from the NJ State Arts Council and the 2012 International Book Award for Poetry. She has read in the US, England, Ireland, and France, and has twice been a featured reader at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival.
Visit Adele online at www.adelekenny.com.