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Poetry

A poem, subscribing to a plan,
Flies higher than the highest planes,
Seems safer than a rose-red tan,
Or traffic in the fastest lanes,
Where people die in random crashes.
And yet how dangerous are words?
Combined, their meaning soon surpasses
A single, random act. Like birds,
We let words fly. The way they fit
Reveals much more than we admit.

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After a Freeze

After a freeze, the ground is hard and sere.
Hard ice piles up upon the crusted snow.
Dry plants shrink back. They seem to show their fear,
As I do when I think back on the flow
Of time and shrink a little in my shell,
And know I’ve learned my lesson very well—
That every crack in armor writes a line,
And in the end you use it as a rhyme.

—from Expansive Poetry Online

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A Visit

On Monday you are in your car just there.
The sun’s glare soars, sharp shoreline breezes sting
Upon my heart; I shiver in the air.
We wander shops where myriad colors sing,
Reflecting from some windows on the wall.

I search out yellow; all the shining air
Falls on a gilt Madonna. We recall
That street where magnets pull us—we lived there.
I rush to greet the Linden tree—we were
All saplings then, our spindly branches bare.

A friendly lunch, dark wine, some laughs. Azure
Above, my pockets filled with leaves I grew,
We talk of friends. Our memories catch a burr—
Fresh breezes blow; each building smiles anew.

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Sally Cook is both a poet and a painter of magical realism. Her poems have also appeared in Blue Unicorn, First Things, Chronicles, The Formalist Portal, Light Quarterly, National Review, Pennsylvania Review, TRINACRIA, and other electronic and print journals. A six-time nominee for a Pushcart award, in 2007 Cook was featured poet in The Raintown Review. She has received several awards from the World Order of Narrative and Formalist Poets, and her Best American Poetry Challenge-winning poem “As the Underworld Turns” was published in Pool. 

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34 Responses

    • Sally Cook

      To find peace in my poems at such a chaotic time in my life makes me feel I must be doing something right!

      Reply
  2. Roy Eugene Peterson

    Sally, your “Poetry” depicts the way I feel about the words contained in verses and the result is so much more than even we as poets may discern or admit.
    “After a Freeze” is a wonderful comparison of plants shrinking from the cold and snow, and our own shrinking into a shell, But, more than that, it is the use we make under such conditions to make something meaningful and beautiful.
    “The Visit” brings colorful images to mind while we tread familiar streets through the lens of memories, but noticing the fresh changes that we notice to the facades of the buildings we love.
    I always enjoy your poems and have great respect for the way you communicate your thoughts and visions to us.

    Reply
  3. Paul A. Freeman

    You remind us that there’s beauty out there amongst all the ugliness, Sally, and spur me on to write something inconsequential in the great scheme of things, but using the best words I can.

    I was particularly enamoured by ‘Poetry’.

    Thanks for the reads

    Reply
    • Sally Cook

      Paul – anything I write that encourages others is a plus for me. Thank you for the thought !

      Reply
  4. Joseph S. Salemi

    Sally Cook has a very powerful capacity for introspection. But it is not wrapped up in herself alone — she turns random thoughts, observations, and memories into polished vignettes and cameos that are almost epigrammatic (without being didactic), and self-revelatory without being preachy or showy.

    Phil Flott mentions the peace that he senses in Cook’s work. There is also a restraint, a depth, and a serenity.

    Reply
    • Sally Cook

      Joe, you are such a subtle critic, and I love it.. This time you have hit on the reasons I don’t write of current events.
      Certainly, I enjoy reading thoughtful poems on any subject,

      As you say, I am inclined to look inward. And certainly the current state of the world seems to demand correction. But
      Having once caught sight of those forces which cause the obvious to happen, I could no longer deal with the immediate. As news anchors are so fond of saying “Isn’t this awful? YOU should do something.”
      WHO? HOW?
      But of course we cannot as we have only incomplete information,
      beleagured leadership, and no power.

      Reply
  5. James Sale

    Some wonderfully aphoristic moments in this. “We let words fly. The way they fit
    Reveals much more than we admit.” Reminds me of Ben Jonson’s dictum: ‘Language most shows a man: speak that I may see thee’. Fine writing, indeed,

    Reply
    • Sally Cook

      James, how good to hear from you. I gladly accept your compliment as, you know fine writing as anyone does !

      Reply
  6. ABB

    Any honest reading of these pieces immediately belies the accusation that this site is a dog pound of frothing fanatics yearning to be uncaged.

    Sally is a soft and sly and ever elegant cat.

    Reply
  7. Cynthia Erlandson

    I especially enjoyed “A Visit”, particularly “my pockets filled with leaves I grew”, which somehow, so succinctly, expresses the deep sentiment we often have for places we used to live, especially places where we grew up. In “After the Freeze”, I really like the way you’ve used a palpable description of a scene, to turn the reader’s attention to use it as a metaphor for “the flow of time” in our lives.

    Reply
  8. Margaret Coats

    “A Visit” says more of the speaker than the visitor. It’s a kaleidoscope of assorted sense impressions, pulled together by the poem’s rhyme scheme, which changes stanza each time an odd rhyme sound comes in, to be picked up in the next stanza. The only standard abab quatrain at the end has none of the rhyme sounds from the first stanza–but ends with the sound that belongs to it alone in “grew” and “anew.” They pick up “you” from the very first line. “You” the visitor has an intriguing effect, felt and heard if not fully expressed.

    Reply
  9. Jeff Eardley

    Sally, whenever I read your work, I float off to another place. Joseph’s analysis is far better than anything I could write. You are an inspirational poet. Thank you for these three gems today.

    Reply
  10. Susan Jarvis Bryant

    Dear Sally, it’s always a treat to read your poetry and this exquisite trio exudes a quiet beauty that touches my heart and lifts my spirits. You really do paint pictures with words, and ‘A Visit’ brings tears to my eyes with its warmth and nostalgia. As ever, you engage all the senses which serves to make those precious moments tangible.

    These lines in ‘Poetry’: “Like birds, / We let words fly. The way they fit / Reveals much more than we admit.” are spot on… and I feel my readers may know me a little more than I bargained for. Sally, thank you for your wise words of wonder.

    Reply
    • Sally Cook

      Such kind and gracious thoughts ! While I was working on my answer to you, our furnace failed, and we are now working on how best to get heat and hot water once again ! so please give me a bit more time. My fingers work much better when not frostbitten !

      Reply
  11. C.B. Anderson

    Often, Sally, your poems begin with something small and mundane that is subsequently expanded into something cosmic and universal. In other words, you have a graceful habit of finding a galaxy in a grain of sand. Sometimes you do this explicitly, sometimes implicitly, and in the latter case the reader is always provided with a “bread crumb” trail leading to understanding. Your poems are personal without necessarily being confessional, but it’s rare when they don’t suggest an intimacy between the poet and the reader.

    In “A Visit” grammatical person flutters a bit. The poem begins in the second person but quickly shifts to the first person (at first singular, and then plural). I just wonder whether there was a method to this, or simply a relaxation of attentiveness to pronouns indicating point of view. It’s a small thing, I know, but the art is in the detail.

    Reply
    • Monika Cooper

      Nice observation, C. B. Those pronoun shifts are so much part of the poem’s “flutter,” its little dance between the inner world and the world shared with the visitor. The two seem to have deep past between them, shared memories of youth or childhood: possibly they are siblings.

      Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Actually, the use of “you” in an impersonal sense is what Sally is employing here. Consider: someone might say to himself in the morning “Well, you have to get up now and get to work.” The “you” is just a substitute for the expected “I” pronoun.

      The impersonal you is frequently employed when giving directions, as for instance in a recipe: “You take three eggs, and you beat them with milk…” It can also appear in cases where someone is complaining about his bad luck or troubles: “You work and slave for years, and what do you get?”

      In English we have the impersonal “one,” but it tends to be limited to more formal speech (“One needs to be aware of the difficulties here…”) The French have “on” and the Germans have “Mann” to work in the same way.

      Reply
      • C.B. Anderson

        Points taken, Joseph. I only asked the question because I have often caught myself, mid-poem, having wandered into a tangle of competing aspects of grammatical person. The same thing also happens in regard to verb tense, especially when navigating the perfect tenses, you know.

    • Sally Cook

      Dear CB –
      Much out of little? Though I must plead guilty to doing that often and just as often doing the reverse. In the long run, how much does it matter?
      Isn’t what’s most significant… the whirl of thought, memory, nostalgia and all the rest of what goes into making a poem.

      Thanks for the close reading.

      Reply
      • C.B. Anderson

        I thought, Sally, that I had made it clear that, in my opinion, the connections you sometimes make between the micro and the macro are are very good things, at the very heart of poetry. My world would be very much diminished without the echoes of your unique poetic voice.

    • Sally Cook

      CB, I plead guilty to starting small, then going cosmic. Sometimes things just happen.

      But then again, sometimes I don’t..

      Thanks for taking an interest in my “flutters”. Anything you say to me is always of interest.

      Reply
  12. Monika Cooper

    You write about the risks involved in writing. “Reveals much more than we admit”: it’s like writing poems is way to trick yourself into truth you couldn’t express otherwise. There’s the literal level, in which you more or less “admit,” and then the other levels, the tone, the connotations and suggestions, that reveal much more.

    “After a Freeze”: is it in part about how flaws become features? That “wrong” word that won’t go away, that crack in armor: instead of deleting, you can make it the kernel of your rhyme scheme. It’s a form of the weakness as strength paradox.

    But my favorite is “The Visit” with the winds of color washing through it and its heart of goldenest gold.

    Reply
  13. Hari Hyde

    What gorgeous poems! I read “Poetry” aloud a few times, attempting to vocalize the elegance of the artistry. This poem caused me to contemplate the journey of a poem. Robert Frost wrote, “I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.” I still wonder, though, whether a poem knows where it’s going as our layered cabinets and caskets of stored memories spring open.

    Reply
    • James A. Tweedie

      Hari, yours is one of the most insightful and spot-on comments I have seen in a long time. It stands alone as well as perfectly complements Sally’s poetic journeys of discovery.

      Reply
  14. Bruce Phenix

    Thank you, Sally, for these short, touching poems which say such a lot about language and self-expression, inspiration, memory and the passage of time. I thoroughly enjoyed them – and am pleased to see that many other people did so too and commented so perceptively on them.

    Reply
  15. Alena Casey

    Sally, I just love your poetry that’s always so thoughtful and evocative. My favorite line here is “we were / All saplings then, our spindly branches bare.”

    Reply
  16. Sally Cook

    Jjasmes, Bruce, Alena, and anyone I may have missed
    I am so pleased that all of you wanted to join in that search for the answers which lurk in what we call poetry Makes me feel I am among friends.

    Reply

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