Childhood
Your first drawing is of the sun You colour it round
and bright like the bouncing ball your father gives you
when you are just three.. What delight you take in both losing
and reclaiming it together as you run far through the leaves
with the sky and the wind Now he thinks you will remember
what it feels like...to hold a world in your hands
Your mother’s world is of a different light She will hold you
in the spell of her song which will assume different shapes At first
you will want to carry it with you wherever you go One day it will
take you to deep places that move you as she fades quietly
like the melody or the more subtle colour you use to paint a dream
Your dream is your portal to the world
Drawn through the rainbow of your imagination
it is being coloured continually by your perceptions
You will spend most of your childhood in its sphere
Here you polish the moon and shine the stars
and trace your name on fragile glass You wonder
where the blue begins and worry about where it ends
Most of the time you spend waiting
waiting for your father to one day return
waiting for your mother to come tuck you in
waiting for loneliness to leave you alone
The terror of the dark The terror of your song
catching in your throat like a bird in the branch of a tree
Later of course there is the terror of stumbling through
entire sentences
of being lost among strangers so tall
you cannot see their faces and.
of the hand that once firmly held yours... slipping away
Much later of course there is the terror
of losing most of your crayons
The Eyes of My Hands
When I was a child
my hands were everywhere
I could not silence them then
I cannot silence them now
I would bury them deep
inside my wounds
but they would rise before me still
like some restless vision
I have given birth to little fists
whose eyes unveil to the slap of wings
Descending upon day they return to their fold
each glimmer of light
all flutter of sound
to nest the promise of unsung dreams
And I suspect in time
though they be bruised by the spears of lilies
the eyes of my hands will not close
And when I have surrendered all
but the last of my songs
you may find one small note humming
from under the corner of my pillow
When I was a child
my hands were Everywhere
Falling to Grace
How unbearably white
The blind on the white window
--Anna Akhmatova
How she slipped a silver coin
under my pillow
how she left a trail of fairy-dust
under her feet—
spirited away the tooth
that fell out of my seven-year old self
I will never know
how
she with stardust on her lips
knew the songs
of the enchanted forest
knew the secret of leaves
and falling stars
the secret of falling asleep
the secret of letting go
My grandmother
reached into the sky
for dreams bluer than blue
to slip inside our heads
while we lay sleeping
Every morning
flowers sang from outside her window
In the pleats of her skirt---choruses of Irving Berlin
Every day
summersaults of grass
sprang from under her feet
and every tree on every corner
whose every leaf was a poem
Invited her to dance on air
That Winter in San Francisco
she was looking toward Heaven
when all the sweet humming in her veins
spilled into the street like a Gershwin Rhapsody
How she slipped into that pillow— so unbearably white--
awakens to this moment as I breathe in the air
Is it your sky Grandmother? that reaches into me?
I reach into myself to find my own breath in Winter--
like all dreams eternal slipping into Light
Antonia Alexandra Klimenko was first introduced on the BBC and to the literary world by the legendary James Meary Tambimuttu of Poetry London–-publisher of T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Henry Miller and Bob Dylan, to name a few. After his death, it was his friend, the late great Kathleen Raine, who took an interest in her writing and encouraged her to publish.
A nominee for the Pushcart Prize, The Best of the Net, and a former San Francisco Poetry Slam Champion, she is widely published. She has been a featured guest at Shakespeare & Company, on a number of occasions, as well as performed or read in other literary venues in the City of Light and elsewhere. Her work has appeared in (among others) XXI Century World Literature (in which she represents France), Jazz and Literature and Maintenant : Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art archived at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
She is the recipient of two grants: one from Poets in Need, of which Michael (100 Thousand Poets for Change) Rothenberg is a co-founder; the second—the 2018 Generosity Award bestowed on her by Kathleen Spivack and Joseph Murray for her outstanding service to international writers through SpokenWord Paris where she is Poet in Residence. She is also Writer/Poet in Residence at The Creative Process. Her selected poems On the Way to Invisible was recently published by The Opiate Books and is now available.
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