Rooftop Poetry Club - Gunilla Kester

Gunilla Kester
Bio:

A native of Sweden, Gunilla Theander Kester, Ph.D., is the author of one chapbook Time of Sand and Teeth forthcoming from Finishing Line Press as part of its New Women�s Voices Series. Her poem �I Came to Your Country (Eva�s Song)� was recently nominated for a Pushcart prize by the Editors of Not Just Air. Her poem �In My Home Town Martin Luther is Still King� was a Finalist in New Millennium Writing 2008; �Shiri�s Piano� won an International Publishers Prize from Atlanta Review and was published in its International Issue, October 2008, distributed in over 120 countries. In 2006, her poem �Day Dream� won �Special Recognition,� In Other Words. Her full-length poetry manuscript The Mountain; Grieving for Harmony was a Finalist in the Colorado Prize for Poetry 2005. Recently, she has won the Gival Press Tri-Language Poetry Competition, been a Finalist in The Glimmer Train Open and had poems appear in The Buffalo News, Radiance, Step, Not Just Air, and Oberon. She has poems in Waging Words for Peace; Buffalo Poets Against War (ed. by Chuck Culhane), Poetic Voices Without Borders (ed. by Robert L. Giron) and forthcoming in Poetic Voices Without Borders, II. She has published many poems in Swedish anthologies and magazines, including Bonniers Litter�ra Magasin, Sweden�s most prestigious literary magazine. An accomplished guitarist she often performs and also teaches classical guitar at The Amherst School of Music. A Fulbright scholar, she has published a scholarly study, Writing the Subject (2^nd ed.). Her CD with Cantor Susan Wehle was released in 2006. She serves as Vice President for the Buffalo Guitar Society. She lives in Buffalo with her husband Daniel and her daughters, Anya and Shiri. Please visit her webpage: http://www.thekesters.net/Gunilla/Welcome.html.

Poems:

In My Home Town Martin Luther Is Still King

In my hometown Martin Luther is still king
every spring when they hammer the theses of their students
to the solid doors of the university.
Yours was so thick they had to order a special nail
from the last remaining blacksmith on the southern coast.
As they pounded it in I had a strange vision
they were hammering your head to the wall.

And the word bled through the meaning of the book.

While the town busied itself as usual serving hot cocoa
at the caf� across the street, eating cool ice cream in the sunshine
clobbering fish to death in the marketplace and studying
butterflies nailed to the dusty wall at school,
I walked under the tall straight beech trees, the short, stout
fragrant magnolias by that door full of holes and listened
to the hammering of that ancient, grotesque ritual
honoring the old Jew-hater Luther who thought he could
change the world by penetrating the word with a nail.

And the world bled through the meaning of the word.

Shiri�s Piano

You hold the chords like my grandfather held spring wheat in his gnarled hand,
a big hand and strong, yet it caressed the silky kernels so gently that they
whispered to him all their dreams of tallness and sunshine and growth

and you break the chords and scatter the kernels over the dark earth
like he did and they grow and grow until they reach our mouths
and we can taste their hard nuttiness warm between our teeth

and they grow in your field until they reach our noses and we smell again the fires
that licked the dry sticks and leaves, turned old to new, covered fields in smoke
hid the mystery of yet another spring, the hunger of our childhood

and they grow until they tickle our ears and make us laugh with pure happiness
and hear again my grandfather�s song as he walked through muddy fields feeding his tired muscles rhythms, singing his hungry body home.

This Time of Sand and Teeth

At this time of sand and teeth
we sink to our knees, crushed like grapes,
ground like corn, crumbled like strong buildings.

I think of how to forget the tone
of our dreams and songs in the morning,
our prayers and dreams at night.

I wonder how we will remember the pace
and the paths up the warlike mountain,
the tracks and the tales of those who return.

They come back�wild eyes, burnt skin�
voices like so many fires in the dark, not knowing
how to paint the source of the light they have seen.

We know Isaac must have wept
and kept a fear of knives, along with his heart;
the voice of an angel made him shimmer.

Some feel at home on Masada,
others choose to stay in the homeless camps below;
both must learn to love and use the weapons we now hold.

On top of the mountain myths are born, heroes and war cries.
Down below babies are born, and mothers who�ll steal for food.
Those who hurt howl in pain.

The world is whole and it is breaking�
their pain, our pain�who can name the difference
when all the pieces are ours to embrace?

Living Among Words

It would be nice if you came back.

In my dream, you return to help me restore
order, clean webs from our creaking door,
sweep crunchy leaves off the front porch.

Even pale as you are, transparent as the leaves.

At your other place, a staircase,
steep and narrow, piled high with books, old
magazines, newspapers, poetry drafts.

Books you wrote yourself and those you translated
spending days, bending words from one language
to another, filing away at stubborn difference.

I am welcome at your threshold but no further.

You have company. Makes me furious. Mad.
Strangely comforted, too, like biting into sour fruit.

Yet, a quick glance at your tidy kitchen, sun flooding
shiny countertops, silent spaces of your beloved face.

No sounds in your new home, a bowl of green pears
on a worn table, scoured textless and white.

Always brilliant, you smile and shrug your shoulders:

See, this being dead is not so bad, not so bad at all,
less lonely than life, brighter than living among words.