Carrie Kornacki, Juried Poet, Friendswood Library Ekphrastic Poetry Reading and Contest

“Northwest Corner, Southeast Light”

Installation by Mary Temple

Rice Gallery 2011

http://www.ricegallery.org/mary-temple/

 

Blue Shadows

Fall

Me, in the loam of my land, land once steaming with wild violets and honey air. 

Me, clawing into the earth, my fingers ivory babies, my life root circling blue

the truths of my rudderless rises and falls.

Palindrome

I dreamt of you and me.  Me, lying on my back, my shadow and an oak’s conjoined.

Flat-glass-blue shapes changed with the rustle of leaves as I thought of Keats’ hazels

swelling in their summer shells. And I knew life not as a series of events but as a curative

prism for the breathing in between.  You were in the garden, examining tomatoes as if they might

save us.  You, who always read me like a palindrome and never understood either way.

Snapshot

A bird turned inside-out, dying in the dry grass under hot sun.  A spirit released

blue, aflame around the stencil of its body, licking through every inch of plumage.

Plato’s quivering shadow that in one last lucid moment remembers in its talons

and wings the blue wind of its every flight.

Carrie Kornacki, Juried Poet, Friendswood Library Ekphrastic Poetry Reading and Contest

Carrie Kornacki is a teacher, poet and children’s writer. She has a B.S. in Journalism and has taught English Language Arts in Ohio and ESL in Suzhou, China. Currently, Ms. Kornacki teaches ESL at Westfield High School in Spring, Texas.  Ms. Kornacki was selected as a juried Poet for the 2013, 2015 and 2016 Houston Poetry Festival and a juried poet for the 2014 Austin Poetry Fest. In 2015 and 2016, she was the recipient of “The Lucille Johnson Clark Memorial Award” awarded to the top Houston Poetry Fest juried poet who is a kindergarten through twelfth grade classroom teacher.