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Books of Poetry you won't want to miss!
Karen Ethelsdattar has three full length volumes of poetry – Earthwalking & Other Poems, Thou Art a Woman & Other Poems and Steam Rising Up from the Soul – as well as two chapbooks, The Cat Poems and Woman Artists & Woman as Art. Her poems have appeared in a number of other publications. She is a New York/ New Jersey based poet, writer, ritual maker and explorer of world spiritual traditions.
Poem to my new address book
A new address book from the Brooklyn Museum
with scarlet red cloth spine
& Hiroshige’s color woodblock prints of people & places
on the cover & between the lined pages.
Beautiful new address book that accosted me in a stationery store
when I had given up looking for one.
An address book bereft of people who have died—
people who have died to me,
people to whom I have died,
people who entered my life & then left,
people whose lives I have entered & then left,
people whom I thought would become friends
who left not even a fingerprint on my life,
people whose presence has lingered
though they have died or moved on.
I have drawn the proofreader’s line with a hook,
for delete, lightly through their names
in the old book.
But I save in a drawer those old address books
like outworn clothes that still hang in my closet.
Yes, those are the names of people who mattered,
sometimes mattered terribly.
Yes, they mattered, still have meaning.
Yes, they still occupy space in my heart.