Featured Poet: Pat Frisella, Farmington

Our featured poet for these two weeks is the hardworking President of the New Hampshire Poetry Society, Pat Frisella.

Pat, the daughter of a decorated WW II combat vet who received his medals in November of 2001, lives with rescued horses on the side of a high hill surrounded by fields and forests and watched over by one of the few remaining manned fire-towers in NH. At night she can walk up the hill to see the lights of Newington, NH some 40 miles away or stand at the window and listen to owls and coyotes. She has won prizes for her short stories, essays, and poems, most recently the Anthony Piccione Memorial "Poets For Peace" Award. Her work has been published in various literary journals and anthologies.

Of the following poem, Pat writes: “I struggle sometimes with trying to maintain awareness of the terrible news in current events and awareness of all that is still beautiful, what Brecht was speaking of when he said it is hard to write about trees when the forest is full of police.  This poem uses a form I learned from listening to Maggie Dietz at PEA one time.  She spoke of weaving together two poems that want to be together but did not arrive together, and that is what I have done here, alternating lines form one with lines from the other, with some final tweaking to smooth out the rough spots.  If you read all the odd lines you get a poem and if you read all the even lines you get another poem, and yet they come together.  An internal struggle.”

Coups de coeur
(Wounds to the Heart)

Cardinals at the windows see enemy
    black and white newspapers turn to color
reflections or crimson hills and horses
    for added effect. There’s a lot of red now, flames,
in the painting on the wall on the other side of
    blasts, and plasma. On today’s front page a van ablaze,
the glass between us and them, and wound
    soldiers in desert camo hauling a white-haired man,
themselves, struggling against an imaginary foe,
    panting, their mouths open, they sprint,
when they run out of real opponents to fight;
    two of them hurry this frail being from doom,
I want to save them from each other, save them from
    children wounded by bombs, burned,
themselves, from this lust and smudge of feathers,
    and a man holding his blood-soaked thigh against pulp,
limp bodies with broken necks. I pull lace
    radiating from where legs have been; I want to save them,
curtains shut and they quiet, and singing, begin to gather
    from each other. I want to save them from themselves,
horsehair and dry grass for their nests, to plump and to redden.

by Pat Frisella