Book of the Week

 Threnody (Moon Tide Press 2022)

 by Donna Hilbert

  

 Review by Sharon Waller Knutson

When I finished Donna Hilbert’s powerful poignant poetry collection, Threnody, which I couldn’t put down, I was out of breath as if I had been jogging for miles on the beach where she walks her dog watching herons, egrets, eagles and mallards take flight.

Using metaphors, rhyme and alliteration, she writes about love and loss, grief and gratitude, despair and hope, ugliness and beauty. In few words, she says so much, showing us that the way to heal a broken heart is through food, nature and classical music.

I have selected poems from her book that I believe best tell the ups and downs of her life since the loss of loved ones.

Culling

I’ve seen them at work,
know what herons do,
how far they travel
in one flap of blue.

Instructions for Pie

Treat dough gently, love it
like the baby in your dreams.
Choose fruit of the season:
today peaches, tomorrow,
apples will be green.

And, always, there are lemons.
Come a sudden summer rain,
meringue falls like a hill of snow.
Don’t despair!
The filling will still be delicious
with soft, tart, sweetness below.

Dear Sadness,

You live in a saddlebag
cinched to my hip
by sinew and bone.
To walk with you is hard.
Please, forgive my complaint.

Others hurt more, I know.
When you were fixed
between atlas and axis
like a petrified necklace,
I hurt more.

 It was hard then to hold up,
 impossible to turn.

Dear Husband,

You’ve been denied my extra portion,
killed as you were before the worst
thing happened. (I still won’t say die
with its connotation of normal, order.)

This kill too fresh for ink to spill
its name, so let’s just say that earth
quakes and oceans empty from my eyes,
eyes I thought would never fill again

 with salt and water sufficient for such
 sorrow, sufficient for such pain

Eclipse

Your death,
young one,
is the moon
blocking the sun,
but it does not pass,
 is not undone.

Idea of Order in the Cupboard

The glasses must match like twin sisters.
The tall ones will stand in the back.
White fine bone cups from Great Britain
hang by their crooks from a rack.

2020

 for Kari Gunter-Seymour

I sit on the back porch
crying into a book
about Appalachian women
cleaving to each other
in life and death.

It’s hot for May. Still, palm trees stir
and in the neighbor’s yard
friends play ping pong, passing time
in this season of seamless time.

 Fear sits with me. I give him his due,
but don’t know how to entertain him.
Then, from the deep unknown
 my mother warns:

 Don’t feed him, Donna June,
 or he’ll never pack up, go home.

My Husband

Hated seagulls and hated salmon,
too much of both in Seattle,
when he studied at the “U.”
 Living in a dorm, you take the food
 as given, and with it also take the view.

In my kitchen with its ocean view
salmon sizzles in a skillet,
it’s sunset, and seagulls sweep
the dimming sky.

What would you think
of this place you left me, this meal
I make for another? A blessing not to see
what’s coming, like the day two tons
of metal swept you from my sky.

Seventh Game of the World Series and I Have a One-Day Breakdown

How ‘bout them Dodgers:
your rhetorical change-up
from politics or personal
line-drive to the gut.

Why won’t you say you love me?
Why don’t you call your mother?
My questions, then your question
How ‘bout them Dodgers.

We don’t talk about the ways
our parents fouled us, or worse,
strikeout after strikeout of our own.
See the ball, hit the ball,

you taught our children.
Lesson enough? I wonder.
But, O those hot dog and peanuts
eating evenings, the cotton-candy

sky dissolving to deep blue,
us in the stadium with our crew,
spring, summer, sometimes fall,
See the ball, hit the ball.

How ‘bout them Dodgers, think
they’ll make it to the fall?  I’m told
that’s what you were saying
when you biked into the sunrise

when the errant driver didn’t see
you, didn’t see that he would hit
you, end your season in the summer.
How ‘bout them Dodgers. 

February 2021

In a fit of hope, I wash and press white shirts
 hidden in the hamper since last March.
 I order lipstick, and a see-through make-up bag
with hooks to hang on any random perch.

Lines Ending with Rumi

Heron feeding nestlings
in the Red Bud tree
brings me to my knees.
There are many ways to kneel
and kiss the ground.

To read Donna’s biography and other poems on this blog:

https://stortellerpoetryreview.blogspot.com/2023/05/storyteller-of-week.html

To buy the book: https://donnahilbert.com/