Cordelia Hanemann

Cordelia Hanemann, writer and artist, currently co-hosts Summer Poets, a poetry critique group in Raleigh, NC. Professor emerita retired English professor, she conducts occasional poetry workshops and is active with youth poetry in the North Carolina Poetry Society. She is also a botanical illustrator and lover of all things botanical. She has been published in Atlanta Review, Laurel Review, and California Review; in the best-selling anthology Poems for the Ukraine, as well as her chapbook. Her poems have been anthologized, nominated for Pushcarts, and performed by the Strand Project. She is now working on a novel about her Cajun roots.

A Giving Poem

                                    i

            It is the season of giving 

and we have gathered around the tree :

            today—this small circle

            tomorrow—only me and my ginger cat

Come : the next day—the circle widens :

            earth / air / fire / water

                                    ii

I give you the fire of a dancing woman

            hearth & volcano : warmth & tumult

I give you the wind of my song

            its lullaby & hurricane : 

            its sweetness / its ferocity

I give you the soil from my garden :

            its seeds & grubs & compost 

I give you my own salty tears 

            collected in my hands : joys & losses

Today in my palm the stone 

            flat and shaped like an amoeba

            found buried in the soil 

            washed by creek waters 

            abandoned on a ledge

one of many now nestled here

I have one for each of you :

            see how they multiply

                                    iii

I give you a candle to carry into the night

            its small fire shall be your truth

I give you a font of water

            to bless the landscape 

I give you a hymn to the sacred /

            a flint to make your new fire 

Take my handful of elements

            and know they are yours

that I am with you

that the universe is with you

"A Giving Poem" new section

                                    iv

Go with each other, not a mile but two or more

I give you my mile / my arm / my coat 

I give you childhood to carry with you

            a talisman into your future

I give you these open hands 

            that you may extend to others 

                                    find the stairs or the stars

                                                whichever comes first

I give you this packet of dirt

            so when you find your destination 

            you will have somewhere to stand

I give you dates & walnuts from my pantry 

            eat & then feed whomever you meet 

                        with what is left over

            and there will be much left over

I give you a prayer I found in the trees 

            a blessing bequeathed by birds

            a story I heard in the pink and silver shell 

                        of a deep black ocean

            a packet of seeds  

Take, take everything I have

to give you and I will have 

            what you take

Walking Home  

    Erasure Poem from Betty Adcock's "Verso 1" 

Walking the deep back pasture

pine copse and barn falling into dusk

cows blurring against the herding dark,

I look west to the small rise

laden with sunset. My steps whisper

in the grass, grow large in shadow.

Precarious songs : katydid and creek frog 

follow me to the great dead oak.

Something commemorative : seasonless, 

hard as language, the tree has stood its own

for as long as I can remember : now

a refuge. I come at evening

bearing my grief like an offering,

the big hill behind me receding,

until the house with its careful garden

goes out like an empty lamp.