Denise Bergman
USA
| Denise Bergman is the author of
Seeing Annie Sullivan, (Cedar Hill Press) poems based on the early life of Helen
Keller’s teacher (2005), which was translated into Braille.
She conceived and edited City River of Voices, an anthology of
urban poetry, and she was the author of Keyhole Poems, a
sequence that combines the history of specific urban places
with the present. Denise has been the poetry editor of
Sojourner, A Women’s Forum, and the host of a cable TV show
“Women in the Arts.” She received several grants from the
Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Puffin Foundation, and her
work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. An excerpt of her
poetry was permanently installed as public art in Cambridge, MA. |
THE LIFE OF AIR
Call him a man who breathed air,
enjoyed that simple occupation and breathed
the invisible incognito
particles slipping down to his warm pink
host of lung, its walls
years later covered like an English ivy
stronghold, horizontal vertical root tendril
same
•
He was mine, and so we discovered
the secret life of air, a secret
so secret it doesn’t recognize its own shell
so secret my heart stops, still,
at even a whisper of its mention
•
No accident, no innocence, no mistake
Yes they knew, all along
insulating themselves in boardrooms
leaking not a word
our pipes, furnaces, brake pads, oven mitts, walls
ceilings, asbestos
•
Not just mine, all of them
who rocked to sleep on Navy ships,
set backyard tomatoes
into a rummage of soil of flecks and flakes,
folk-danced in the high school gym,
ciphered accounts at a busy desk
or welded chassis or sewed
collars on woolen coats and breathed air,
all
all of them
•
Greed like a wolf
lurking
evil wind, evil soil
Who better than the daughter
to tell the story:
air
and the moment we see what we cannot
see
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© Copyright, Denise Bergman
All rights reserved by author. |