Wilda Morris, Workshop Chair, Poets and Patrons of Chicago, and past President of the Illinois State Poetry Society, has published hundreds of poems in anthologies, webzines, and print publications. She has won awards for formal and free verse and haiku. Her most recent collection is Pequod Poems: Gamming with Moby-Dick. Her poetry blog at wildamorris.blogspot.com features a monthly poetry contest.
Where It Began
All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries
while she is a four-month-old fetus in the womb of her mother.
This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb
of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our
grandmother’s womb, and she in turn formed in the womb
of her grandmother.
~ Layne Redmond, When the Drummers were Women
There is something metaphoric about stacked
Russian dolls, how the little egg-shaped girl
sits inside the mother, the mother inside
the babushka, perfect fits, but separable,
each doll herself. It’s like that, I think,
me cellular but unformed in Mother’s body
while she was a fetus in her mother’s womb,
a great start for my life, the beginning
of the many ways I was nurtured by Mother
and Grandmother, the ways their strength
and openness to the world gave me the pluck
to be myself while still held in the wings of their faith,
my pulse beating to the rhythms they taught,
the songs they sang still echoing.
~ Wilda Morris
Previously published in Nostos, IV (2020), p. 119.
Noah’s Flood
“. . . Noah’s flood is not yet subsided;
two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.”
~ Herman Melville, Moby Dick [Chapter 58]
Two-thirds of the world is watery,
calling the vagabond, the troubled,
the adventurous, the meditative,
to come to the shore and beyond,
to sail out into the deep,
the gull and albatross overhead
and beneath feet which play the deck like a drum,
teeming villages of dolphin, shark, squid,
and thousands of other species, many still unknown.
We’ve learned to love remnants
of the flood, what flows between continents
and up estuaries, waves that foam,
climb the air and fall,
the white sapphire sparkles on the surface
in moonlight or sun.
Scientists say the ice is melting,
the flood returning.
When the waters don’t recede
and whole cities sink below the crest,
you and I will play the role
of Noah’s neighbors.
~ Wilda Morris
Originally published in Pequod Poems: Gamming with Moby-Dick by Wilda Morris (Kelsay Books, 2019).
Morning in the Wetlands
Looking for my lost self
I walk the Wetlands path.
A redwing’s quiet conk-la
and its shrill reeee! announce
I’m trespassing. When I step
too close to his mate’s nest,
she chitters her tink, tink, tink.
He flies in, a kamikaze aiming
for my head. Okay, Okay,
I say, quickening my step
away from his marsh mate,
I’m willing to watch
from a distance. A mallard
mother, camouflaged
among cattails, broods
her eggs, guarded
by her green-headed
hero. At my approach
he shifts, stands,
takes a few uneasy steps.
I have not come here
to bring fear, only to
get in touch with some
part of me hidden within,
something released only
in the presence of the wild,
the unpredictable,
the unspoiled. I turn
to leave, still not at rest.
A great blue heron
lands on the water
like a blessing.
~ Wilda Morris
Published in the anthology, Natural Voices: Celebrating Nature with Opened Eyes (Natural Land Institute, 2018).
After I Argued with Francisco during Dinner in San Miguel de Allende and He Dropped Something into My Diet Coke
My eyelashes fluttered, became butterflies,
cerulean and gold. They smelled like blueberries
so I plucked and ate them. The tortilla
I dropped tattooed a Mayan sun disk on my right ankle.
Drops of my blood splattered on the stripped floor,
became notes on a treble clef and sang La Bomba.
I leapt up, clicked my knuckles like castanets.
My blue jeans became a scarlet skirt.
I spun out into the night to the rhythm
of a painting by Frieda Kahlo,
whirled into El Jardin.
When I paid a pigeon cinco pesos
for three boxes of Clorets, it offered me wings
instead. I flew into the tower of La Parroquia,
pulled the ropes of all four bells. They were heavy
as Diego Rivera. When the bells rang, I jumped
onto the horse behind General Allende,
circling the park in his blue uniform.
Startled, the horse galloped fast
as the bite of a jalapeño. Francisco’s laugh,
an octave higher than bougainvillea,
turned his cigarette into a stick, his teeth,
to corn-on-the-cob. I smeared butter
and chili powder on them and sold his mouth
in the north-east corner of El Jardin.
I clapped. Skin dropped off my arms and legs.
My face became a candy skull. I hobbled home alone,
now a Katrina on skeletal feet.
Moon Dust
For years he [the Nantucketer] knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last,
it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would be to an Earthsman.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 14
Moon dust has no salty scent,
no fishy smell, no reminder
of brine or earthly shoreline.
It does not smell like Kansas soil
awakening in spring,
or windblown Sahara sand.
Moon dust, the dust of broken molecules
smashed by eons of meteorite collisions
left with unsatisfied electron bonds
seeking partners, has no smell at all
when left in place as it was
for billions of years, dry and destitute,
but comes alive when touched by moisture
in a lunar lander or the mucus membrane
of an astronaut’s nose.
It smells something like fireplace ashes
sprinkled with water or the Indianapolis 500,
something like spent gunpowder
but unlike the smell of land or sea
on earth, our home. We only know
from the word of astronauts
who kicked up dust, who picked up dust
on space suits, helmets and boots,
who bottled dust and brought it back
to answer questions of the curious,
their fellow sailors on this little speck
in the vast sea of space.
~ Wilda Morris
[Originally published in Journal of Modern Poetry]
Fog
Beginning with a line by Ellen Watson*
I am the age of my daughter who still loves fog,
but it is sun on the wooden porch I love,
the way heat pushes through my skirt into skin.
It is the rough bark of the apple tree scratching
my calf as I climb to a higher branch I love,
evening-damp grass as I roll down a hill,
cocoa hot enough to singe my tongue.
Fog is a curtain I cannot feel.
Wilda Morris
The first line is from the poem, “Glen Cove, 1957,” by Ellen Watson. “Fog” was first published by
The Avocet.