A gold coin slipped to each of us ©Stella Body, 2021 Those for whom light is blood … -quote from Tim Bowling Today, as I step into the morning kitchen, my arms leave me to lift and stretch outward – my own body surprising, involuntary, sibling-stemmed as a young plant. Single andContinue reading “For Siblings Day”
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Birds Fly Up
Birds fly up (Sketch for a new paradigm) ©Stella Body 2021 A New Year and a nearly new pair of hiking boots– hand-me-downs from my son, who is growing up–startles me when I look below. Birds fly up from where my feet have been –some skilled scorer of soles has set sky-creatures in the ground —Continue reading “Birds Fly Up”
Alone under the Moon
Alone under the Moon ©Stella Body 2020 Lover of loneliness and wandering, of upcast eye and tender pondering… – Keats A day twice-wintered, by season and by long lock-down… All my antidotes – the brief fureants I dance from kitchen to front hall to set my blood coursing, the huge desk, fashioned to the shapeContinue reading “Alone under the Moon”
Walking into the Wind
Walking into the wind ©Stella Body 2020 Leaning upon the wind that moves the mind… -quote from Jean Garrigue I walk toward the western sun, through lit grasslands of spiked teasels, purple asters, new-fired goldenrod, tree silhouettes dipping and swing-dancing in the lake’s arms, on waves of wind that stretch long, pliant limbs upContinue reading “Walking into the Wind”
Wind over Water
Wind Over Water ©S.Body 2020 When I arrive, the northern lake is still. A plate of glass. A playing card, twin mountains reversed into each other, illuminated from above and below. In the distance, a shimmer of evening traffic, too faint to remind me of what I’ve left behind. A pandemic, a lost job, a placeContinue reading “Wind over Water”
Element of Launch
Element of Launch ©Stella Body 2020 A woman wearing a hijab is taking two children out in a canoe. I watch the lake unfold its hugeness, the sky bring its boulders down. She hesitates a moment, but once in, she sits dead center, straight as Joan of Arc, saddled by the twin forms of herContinue reading “Element of Launch”
Element of Still
Element of Still ©Stella Body 2020 African Journal: All afternoon, a small green frog sits near me at the far southern edge of a diminishing ‘mkondo’ (Swahili word for creek). Today, the water flows so slowly, it has begun to go backwards. Still he doesn’t move. His skin is smooth, live green freckled with amber. Continue reading “Element of Still”
What flows here
What flows here (a piece for Canada Day) ©Stella Body 2020 It may seem strange to write about Africa on Canada Day, but for me it makes perfect sense. I remember arriving in Montreal as a teenager, still parched and shrunken from an ailment I had developed on the dark continent, where I was born. PerhapsContinue reading “What flows here”
Element of Father
Element of Father ©Stella Body 2020 Climber of peaks, you I saw first on the steep East coast of Africa, hurling your slender dark, a javelin into the turbid waves, a chaos you craved. I was not yet three, but a faint motherly care-song pressed from my lips, a murmur for the rosebud tenderness of yourContinue reading “Element of Father”
Element of Wild
Element of Wild ©Stella Body The flash taught me to be calm, not to lose light in the sky, to search inside of myself for the galleries of earth… -Pablo Neruda In the summer night, I find you, perched in a branch above me. Your markings, the subdued gray and white of one who once decorated aContinue reading “Element of Wild”
Gifts from the Trail 