“Visiting Rosita,” published in the
International edition of Persimmon Tree
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link for more details
This
50th edition of Persimmon Tree is guest edited by Heather H. Thomas.
I am more than honored to share the pages with fourteen seasoned poets in this
International edition.
Here is an excerpt from the introduction: "Our poetic materials and acts of writing become more vital, even more “a necessity of life”; as the late American poet C.D. Wright said: “It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so.” Thus, we explore, interrogate, survive, thrive – we create what it means to be a woman in late season practicing poetry now. The poems in this folio from Argentina, Australia, Canada, Denmark, England, Israel, England, Poland, Russia, Singapore, and Switzerland confirm, as Wallace Stevens wrote, “that the whole world is material for poetry” and that “the purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.”
Here is an excerpt from the introduction: "Our poetic materials and acts of writing become more vital, even more “a necessity of life”; as the late American poet C.D. Wright said: “It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so.” Thus, we explore, interrogate, survive, thrive – we create what it means to be a woman in late season practicing poetry now. The poems in this folio from Argentina, Australia, Canada, Denmark, England, Israel, England, Poland, Russia, Singapore, and Switzerland confirm, as Wallace Stevens wrote, “that the whole world is material for poetry” and that “the purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.”
The poets include Sue Lockwood, Marianne Larsen, Irina Mashinski,
Marion Leeper, Diti Ronen, who I met at the Curtea des Argos International
Poetry festival in Romania in 2017, Patricia Diaz Bialet, Wendy Kline, Krystyna
Lenkowska, Karen Alkalay-Gut, Susan Wismer and Heather H. Thomas.
Visiting Rosita
Rosita is so thin now. Does
she forget to eat?
Has her tongue lost its
sense of taste? Is she never hungry?
I remember when she had
hips,
remember when she danced
and
partied long after my
head and tired limbs
had sent me to bed.
I wondered how she, ten
years older,
found the staying power.
Rosita sits surrounded by
visitors.
Her bare arms, pale,
blue-veined,
soak up the summer sun
she has willed herself to
reach.
Rosita, a former teacher,
lover of lingos,
and still multi-lingual, links
faces to spoken tongue,
as we stroll along the
conversation road,
but the strain of it
brings on a blend of
German, English, Portuguese,
French, Spanish.
Soon the visit, with its babel
of accents, is draining.
The battery of mind slows;
the forgetting begins.
I return Rosita to the
room she is confined to,
that sanitized space, free
of lived-in-odors,
bare of her history,
empty of familiar furniture
and salsa music, once her
companion when alone.
The generic hotel for the
old and unwell
is airless in the summer
heat.
I ask Rosita the names of
recent guests
to jot them in the
visitors’ notebook
but names have
disappeared with departed faces.
Bidding her goodbye, I
head to the lift,
turn left and left and left again,
my reminder of the maze followed
to her room
How do occupants find
their way
in the endless bending of
corridors?
I see them wandering
around,
lost in time and space.
© Althea Romeo-Mark 2018
Althea Romeo Mark is an educator
and internationally published Caribbean poet.
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