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| Gail "minerva" Hawkins 4/12/19 |
minerva read "Friendly Fire Forgiving Spirits" at the San Diego Art Institute earlier this poetry-month. The first Patsy mentioned in the poem was the wife of Joe Milosch with whom minerva taught in California Poets in the Schools (CPITS). The second Patsy was minerva's sister.
After long careers as a researcher and then as a poet teacher, minerva has turned to television writing. Her series is called "Those Ebony Girls," and is a comedy about a black family in 1970s Philadelphia, the matriarch being a member of the 30's intelligentsia and her granddaughter being a new post-graduate who has come to the edges of answers that don't match the new questions.
The story also includes the post-grad's sister, not unlike the one mentioned in the poem below. "Friendly Fire Forgiving Spirits" is the voice of a woman writing her way through life's Act III, paying attention and respect.
Gail "minerva" Hawkins will perform at The Victory Theater on May 19 as part of Backstory's "The Kids Are Alright" reading at 7 p.m. The Victory Theater is located at 3326 Victory Boulevard in Burbank, California.
Friendly Fire Forgiving Spirits
--for Patsy's husband Joe and for my late sister Patricia
Burning bright years after their friendly fires
Were said to have gone out forever
Patsy and Patsy passed away from a same-named illness.
Cancer separated them from their loved ones.
Spirits times two. Linked bright eternal.
Both help me fight fire with fire each God-given day
Like the outdoor California nature job of a wife named Patsy
And the cold indoor bookkeeper’s bed-for-a-desk of my sister Patricia.
The Patsys worked for years and retired with accumulated ER visits and sick days.
Laughter-laced warm conversations roamed their sick rooms from time to time
Answered by friends’ slips of tongues and lips outside hospital doors, metal and shivering
Conversations after ablaze, thundering with thoughts of what likely comes next.
I’m alone again and again; gone are a friend, my mother-sister and yet another sibling-sister!
California husband Joe, me and the rest of us went down a few pegs when they all passed.
Poet Joe was back, I know, when he translated the alphabet, letter by letter
Each page a poetic matrix of poems by himself, on his own with his wife for life.
Our Patsys were Frida Kahlo spirits of female forests.
They climbed Mount Everest like broken-bodied super hikers
Crossing a summit of earthly chasms between fullness of life and wholeness of pain
Morphed into a crescent moon of death, a cradle for a comfortable departure.
Thank you Patsy and Patsy for allowing me to be human, right, and wrong.
To be one’s sister and the other’s friend, and forgiving me when I was neither.
My sister Patricia leaves off. The other Patsy remains in her husband’s care.
Friendly fires extinguished. Bright smoke wafting.
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