complete breath

when i-who-resists-change spattered hot wet balls of bereavement 
against distant walls
tiny cries of surprise and anguish leapt to life
like jumping beans surfing a hot rush of air
sliding sing-song in a curiously amplified exhalation 
- Huh huh huhhhhhhhh

continuing to exhale
i-who-avoids-change expelled
a living tsunami of spirit, sputum, and tears
a salt-saturated wake pulsing forward
exhibiting in its egress
a potent production of disintegrating debris
dropping heavily out

and out
on the breath

i-who-refuses-change
saw its soft pillow
denial
take the shape of a despairing angel
saw it lifted and carried by hurricane-force winds
its white robe a flapping flag
its countenance a desperate grimace
beauty by ugly truth perforated
drifted beyond its will to be
then
still expiring
croaking one dying blast after another
escaping bliss hissed a wild idea into view
a belief that the prior world could be resurrected
by a refusal to inhale

and
tiny
i who-entertains-the-possibility-of-change floated
in the void between breaths
sharing space with this new knowing
that
because of the nature of breath
emptiness is filled and fullness is emptied

Nancy Dymond is a third year member of New York’s Upper Delaware Writers Collective. She has been a participating poet in the Short Readings event sponsored by the Wayne County (PA) Arts Alliance for the past four years. In June of 2007 she resigned her editorship of Wayne County Arts Alliance’s newsletter, ArtsTalk, to concentrate on other creative endeavors.

In 1995 and 1996 during a post-divorce return to college to obtain a marketable skill (accounting), her poems “The Hand of O’Neill” and “For Lillie” won first and second prizes in the Alyssa Katon Writing Contest. One of Nancy’s poems, “Leaves Drying in the Son,” was included in a recent collaborative art exhibit at Marywood University in Scranton, PA. “The Way A Poem Lives” is featured in the online poetry journal Right Hand Pointing. In August several of her poems will be displayed at the Fireside Restaurant near Honesdale, PA, in a group show of word-related art.

Nancy continues to explore poetry through the monthly poetry workshops and special events of the UDWC, which was founded and is led by Mary Greene. Last winter the collective did a public reading of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood at NACL in Highland Lake, NY. Summer brought the group to Grey Towers in Milford, PA, for an outdoor reading of “tree poems.” September’s DIG-IT, the international digital film festival in Narrowsburg, NY, gave the poets an exciting opportunity to stir word concepts and visual contexts together with a digital ‘spoon’ into a set of pieces that play virtually on the theme of life in a small town.