Mary Kellerman Louisville, Kentucky

Mary Kellerman, a native of Jefferson County, Kentucky, has resided in Louisville, Kentucky for more than forty years. She graduated from Sacred Heart Academy and the University of Louisville. While attending graduate School there, she won the poetry prize. She has published a novel of Tudor England Falcons Volant. She is self employed in reality investments and a member of the Audubon Society and the Kentucky Humane Society. In her free time she enjoys opera and sings soprano. She is an active gardener who feeds birds and raccoons as well as stray cats. Her philosophy of poetry is wanting to make a thing of beauty.

Equinox The year's wavering Between these fogs and silences That on the fields call forth the hours Of steady council and iron hands. So darkening to it's utterest day When bracken bends to one thin line And gray moors trade again This dim misty dream of cold For miles beneath from the hills. The fire that burns to winter's end Spread it's fogs from frozen brakes And rivers of ice stream into mist From stars wild out of the north And nights lie dead in the early time White knighted by the glittering reeds. Crested by some tall Lord to a fire Where silver goes stale against a moon Aft of any point to a newer green Burning from Arcturus to the sands Seas going south take up this wind Weedy with fathoms falling to land.

Malaise It was a dark cold stair With windows to the sea And open to the Irish wind. Drafty hallows followed me And my murmuring skirts - I leaned out to the wind To catch it in one thin hand. To pass them but at darkest hour About my gentle lingering to bed Before going farther up the tower That stood aloft in the Irish wind. Waiting below at each dawning Was a restless hand that caught me As I went from task to task But never so relentlessly So bright with foreign singing As the wind from the Irish sea.

Tristan Seedlings sprung from the fields These pines were summoned By his defiant hand. Held by the arid winds Beside these stones well set To make a wall against the west. Darker thank he dial at dawn They sadden the dim hot noons As though there were Or might have been A rare tranquility and fallen rain. I look away to speak of vervain It blooms as it did a year before. A pungent silence Gray clouded leaves Shadowed in spice and forgetfulness. Old stones quivering in a new season Shudder with the tides beneath And a moon full of storms. If these are tears Say I am mourning a lost province.

All poems Copyright © 1996 Mary Kellerman. All rights reserved.