K. C. Francis
K. C. Francis litrally brings a bag of tricks to her readings. It's a poetry bag filled with items representing things that appear in the poems she will read. Each is presented at the beginning and laid out for the audience to see, then left there for them to connect with individual poems later. Lively in a refined sort of way, her delivery is clear and smooth. Though her voice has a soft quality, all her words are heard.
TIPPI HEDREN SYNDROME
only Alfred Hitchcock
could make birds
seem evil.
Now the newspaper
reports on birds
testing positive
to this exotic-sounding virus.
And we've stopped
sitting around in the dark
these summer nights
because it's scary.
Mosquitoes have been
implicated, too. They
find our too white skin
and our too Irish blood
delectable, teasing us
with the prospect of
experiencing Egypt
from the inside, smelling
the breeze along the West Nile,
spending eternity in the
company of the pharaohs.
ONE WARPED VIEW
OF GUN CONTROL
not to be holding a
gun when you're
thinking of killing
yourself.
A gun makes
suicide way too easy,
like blow drying your
hair or caulking a bathtub.
Whoosh, squiggle, and
you're dead.
15,000
gun owners
found that out
last year.
They never found out
how oddly better
things look the day
after the black mood
after suicide sidles up
and suggests itself like
an open box of candy
and you rifle through
the wrappers, hoping,
only to come up empty,
exhausted and glad to be
living.
RANDOM BEAUTY
you'd stuffed
petunias into
a geranium pot,
I thought you'd
acted carelessly,
out of places
to put petunias,
and I thought it
wrong somehow
those open-faced
petunias and two
woody geraniums,
one pink, one salmon,
wintered over more
than once, maybe
since the time
my mother sat
with us on the deck.
But tonight, after dinner,
dragging from a long, hot
day at work, I sink into
the double cushions of
the gray wooden deck
furniture we painted
a few summers back.
From the corner of my eye,
in the blur of the warm night,
I see beauty so unexpected
I can't look at anything else -
round, full geraniums
standing tall on their
staunch legs, petunias,
pink and lavender, seemingly
fragile but tough in their own
right, the clay pot, the weathered
wood of the deck, the glen of trees
grown lush since the ice storm
all those years ago and you and I
30 years creating random beauty.
This collection was posted here in October 2000.
For more poetry by KC Francis, together with some stunningly gorgeous photographs by Robert S. Harris, please check out their book, Music for the Eyes, published in 2004 by Harris Photoguides. (ISBN 0-9721344-0-9) More information is available at: http://www.HarrisPhotos.com
All poetry and other artistic writings are © their authors and reproduced here with their permission.
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unless otherwise noted.
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