Ruth Daigon
STAINED GLASS CANTATA


I want Promethean heat of summers
and the future stretching like a field with no fences.
I want dreams leaking into real time
turning darkness into a treasury of light.

I want to shut out the yammer and slam around us
gossip stretching its three necks
tongues humming like locusts
during the first Pharonic plague.

I want to shape a space for calm
and stand kneedeep in Mendelssohn and Mozart
singing stained glass cantatas
under haloes of the moon.

I want to step out of windows
and drown in fire bursts of flowers
or strip the fuzz from the peach
and tongue the blush on the flesh below.

I want the feeling
that we're quite ourselves again
resilient as earth
and moving like snails in slow motion lust
deep in the expectations of love.


SHADOW DANCE


I will enter this amber life
with wonder
and appetite.

I will probe earth with blackened fingers
and swim across deep rivers
to the lost shores.

and the unknowable mind of water.
I will write my name on the dune
with long fingers of sand.

Tonight there is no moon
and giants and dwarfs
people the planet.

They will teach me to enter the world
away from the wind,
from the wild grass and the shadow dance of the earth.

I will sit in the blind center of morning,
caged in light where clocks tick, cats purr and children
gift me with banquets of wild flowers

granting me a life beyond all life
where I move once more
mute among the hours.

Ruth Daigon was founder and editor of Poets On: for twenty years until it ceased publication. She won "The Eve of St. Agnes Award (Negative Capability) 1993. Her poems have been widely published: Shenandoah, Negative Capability, Poet & Critic, Kansas Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly,Atlanta Review, Poet Lore, Tikkun, Prism, Green's Magazine....Internet "E" zines include Ariga, Crania, CrossConnect, Zuzu's Petals, Switched-On= -Gutenberg, Poetry Cafe, Apples & Oranges, Moonshade, Gravity Bluepenny, Blue Moon.... also Poet-Of-The-Month on The University of Chile's Pares Cum Paribus (an "E" chapbook in English and Spanish) Web Del Sol (a chapbook of her work that appears permanently on the WEB) Her latest poetry collection is "Between One Future And The Next" (Papier-Mache Press) 1995. "About A Year" (Small Poetry Press in 1996).

Daigon's poetry awards include "The Ann Stanford Poetry Prize", 1997 (University of Southern California Anthology, 1998) and The Greensboro Poetry Award (Greensboro Arts Council, 2000). Her last poetry collection "The Moon Inside" (Gravity/Newton's Baby) was published December 1999. She is part of Pudding House Publications Poetry Chapbook Series "Ruth Daigon's Greatest Hits 1970-2000". "Payday At The Triangle" (Small Poetry Press Select Poets Series) based on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City, 1911 was published in 2001and one of many readings was performed in the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in Manhattan, the area where the fire occurred. Her next poetry book "Handfuls of Time" (Small Poetry Press, Select Poets Series will appear in 2002 and a possible CD based on several of her books as well.

 

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