POETRY
Writing poetry is like a pilgrimage for me into what poet Stanely Kunitz called “the telling of the stories of the soul.” After my mother died I needed quiet, and I also needed poetry at this time to stitch the threads of my sadness into poems.
This craft of writing poetry helps me to stop and stand still in the din of a day—to notice what I don’t take time for– -to reflect on with poetic language the magic, mystery and meaning my life holds. As my late friend and poet RC Willliams once said when describing what poetry meant to him: “Poetry is the most profound way of approaching one’s own being.”
Leftover Prayers
“In rich sensory language, Florence “set[s] out in search of God,” and finds instead openings to herself that are loosed from her observations. Turtles, feathers, music, dreams and borrowed prayers become conduits for “what lingers long in [her].”
-Lisken Van Pelt Dus: author of What We’re Made Of.
Her words feel like sun on our shoulders after a spring downpour, as if we too are called to sit/under these bare branches / and like the wisteria / let the sky in.
-Katie Kingston: author of The Future Wears Camouflage.
Click on book to purchase
A Stunning Absence, poems for all who grieve
“How do we let go and yet still attend to the memories of those we love? Susan Florence’s collection of spare, haunting poems is a “steady chanting, building through accumulated imagery and music, a sacred space in which acceptance ripens from grief, and those missing are gathered momentarily, before scattering again. I am struck by the quiet beauty of these poems. How they question and accept; and gain, incrementally, an understanding of loss. This is a collection worth sitting with.”
~Justen Ahren, author of A Machine For Remembering
Purchase A Stunning Absence from Finishing Press HERE.
Legacy
In Memorium of Valentina Blackhorse, 28
Died of Coronavirus, April 23, 2020
For my daughter Poet:
I wash sleep from your eyes
with cloth woven of the Milky Way.
Gently, these starlit threads in sky’s night
will open you to day.
I feed you words of our unwritten language
that voices of the elders will nurture you;
their stories sown in you, shared
and spread like wild morning glory on desert floor.
I clothe you in my jingle dress
to sparkle and dance at one
with rattle, flute, whistle, and drum
in prayer ceremony and song.
You will spring tall as fertile fields of corn
and the spirit of sister turtle will enable you
to walk a long life on sacred soil.
Plumes of brother eagle will crown your hair.
Your family of all living things
will guide you, and your homeland
of plains, mountains, forests, and lakes
will be your ground.
They say I left too soon
“a beauty, someone who cared about our culture,
a woman with dreams of leading the Navajo Nation.”
But the dream I dreamed was you.
“Legacy” was a finalist in the Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Contest and published in the Red Wheelbarrow Literary Magazine. It has the distinction of being nominated for the 2020 Pushcart Prize.
Fire That Night
by Susan Florence
It was not that red wings of flame
raced over hills drained by drought
not that the wind rose up
in mother nature’s omen of a roar
not that the sky billowed tangerine
or the house lost light.
It was the drum of my heart
as my mind foresaw what may come
It was the embodied fear of knowing
I am nothing next to nature.
And like in shock as my father died,
when the unspeakable becomes real,
it was something there were no words for—
the fire was happening in me.
Fire That Night was published in two anthologies: From the Fire, Ojai Reflects on the Thomas Fire, and Psalms of Cinder and Silt. Readings were held at the EP Foster Library and at the Museum of Ventura County. (January and November 2019)
I Watch Bon Jovi and Wonder How Come I’ve Missed It All
by Susan Florence
It’s the same as India
adoration
as I’ve never known in flesh
never felt in soul
It’s belief
way greater than you or me
than the rock star
the guru
than pulsing light
that glorifies this space
than din of chants
that resonate.
How could I have missed it all
this delirious display of bliss
he sings “lay your hands on me.”
It’s fervor
music marked in beat
where communion and ecstasy meet
It’s not too late
I can find it,
but it was not in Varanasi giving offerings at dawn
on saffron waters of the Ganges
not in the temples of Pushkar,
I thought it would enter me in Arangabad
inside one of the ancient Ajanta caves
like it entered the purple robed monk prostrated there
at the feet of the Buddha on the stone floor
but no–and not now
in this arena where words of songs like prayers
are mouthed by everyone.
* I Watch Bon Jovi and Wonder How Come I’ve Missed It All won 3rd place in the VCWC annual contest and was read by Susan
at their contest celebration April 2019.
Susan Florence at the Camarillo Community Memorial Service June 2018. Her talk, as the guest speaker, included personal stories about her mother’s time with Hospice and poems from her chapbook called: A Stunning Absence, poems for all who grieve.
Quill and Parchment
Susan has been selected as a Featured Poet for the online journal called: Quill and Parchment
Curvas Peligrosas
“While Listening to Thich Nhat Hanh”
As the two lanes tunnel through jungle
and signs warn Curvas Peligosas,
we let Mr.Lucky’s broccoli truck,
heavy on our tail, pass.
We listen to “Lessons of Impermance”
and the calm, gentle voice of the monk,
You can empty yourself of passing anger
by bowing down to earth.
My husband steps on the gas to beat
the round bellied truck marked Gasolina
and we whiz by a row of wreathed white crosses
and shrine with marigolds, a baby angel on top.
If you don’t know how to die
you don’t know how to live,
words whispered as the Mercedes bus White Star
comes at us and thunders by.
Green glows like peridot on parota, papaya and palm.
Vines string purple blossoms across the road
from weeping fig to ficus.
We drive beneath nests of the cacique
hanging like brown bags from the end of limbs,
this bird’s way to protect her babies from prey.
The singing bowl on the CD soothes me
as it lingers in air
like the white wings of the mariposas
lifting everywhere.
By Susan Florence
* Curvas Peligrosas was chosen as a finalist in BorderSenses poetry contest and published in BorderSenses Literary and Arts Journal, Volume 21, Fall 2015
A review of Susan Florence’s chapbook “A Stunning Absence”
by Wilda Morris for her monthly Poetry Challenge, August 2015.
SATURDAY, AUGUST 1, 2015
August Poetry Challenge: A Grief Poem
Grief is a natural part of the human condition. Although we know that we and all those we love must die, we struggle to deal with loss. I recently reread A Stunning Absence: poems for all who grieve, a chapbook by Susan Squellati Florence. She has given me permission to share some of her poems.
“Cousins Weekend, Monterey,” deals with the death of a child.
We cradle her, hold her fists
as best we can, not one of us knowing
how to live after a child has died.
I lost a grandchild more than twenty years ago, and those lines pull at my chest. I know their deep truth.
“Waiting for a Patch of Blue” puts us in a sanctuary for a funeral:
The church stood large and cold.
When the blind man played
the piano, sang Ave Maria,
not one of us could move.
Then the poem takes us on the highway toward home. The narrator is in that emotionally empty (my word), having to return to every-day life:
I listen to the windshield wipers
follow the broken white lines on Highway 101,
keep my foot on the gas.
Here are two poems from the collection:
White Mariposas, Mexico
for Linda
Our mothers are leaving us, like white butterflies
they lift. I look out above lighted jungle leaves
and watch them rise in pure ascent.
Dear cousin, your email says, Mom Is Failing Fast.
I wish I could be with you now, back
in the summers when we were country girls.
There, I can see Aunt Annie in her apron,
hear her call and the wood screen door slam
as we carry our secrets in and out, out and in.
Ice tea waits in the tin pitcher with cool water
pumped from the well, and vine red tomatoes
sliced in Wonder bread sandwiches.
Raucous, yellow-bellied kiskadees wake me here,
like the cows that bellowed us out of bed
on hot August mornings at the ranch.
They wake my thoughts about your mom and mine,
dear sisters, they are leaving us, like white butterflies
they lift, and we can’t touch them as they fly.
~ Susan Squellati Florence
Almost One Year
for Mary
It happened somewhere between the broccoli
and yogurt, or was it in the soup aisle
that my sister knew
she would never see him again.
She could not breathe
or control the course of her chest,
and held on to the shopping cart
for how long she does not know.
Wandering the market
where he shopped for her,
she followed the metal basked
until it filled.
One apple, one power bar,
one energy drink.
~ Susan Squellati Florence
“White Mariposas, Mexico” shows us a narrator mourning for her aunt and her mother. Her aunt is dying.
There is a bit of ambiguity about whether the narrator’s mother is also dying or has already died. Either way, it
is fresh grief. “Almost a Year” shows us the narrator’s sister dealing with the loss of her husband a year after it
happened—a reminder that grief has many faces. It can overwhelm us at the time of a loss. As the poem, “An
Undeniable Joy” demonstrates for us, eventually joy can break through.
Like poppies along the road
Sprouting in dry soil
Spreading gold.
But those blossoms of joy do not wipe grief out of our hearts. Even years later, something happens, and
the grief takes away our breath. We talk about the grandchild who died, and tears flow, though twenty years
have passed. We look out a car window and see day lilies like grandmother grew; the radio plays a song to
which we danced with our now deceased partner. It is graduation day, or a wedding, and it seems so wrong
that one parent is no longer living.
Another of my favorites in the collection is “A Young Woman Writes to a Composer,” but I’m not including
it here, because the women in question seems to be dealing with her own approaching death, which
is outside the bounds of this month’s challenge.
In the interest of full disclosure: Susan Florence is a friend whom I met at the San Miguel
Poetry Week in Mexico, and I know the person whose death is lamented in the title poem.
A Stunning Absence is sold by Finishing Line Press
Susan Florence is also the author of a gift book, When You Lose Someone You Love. The book, designed with
illustrations of nature and water, is was written with few words, It is intended, she says, “as a caring gift to
give someone after they have lost someone they have loved. . . . even many months or years later, because the
ones we love live on within us forever.”
It can be purchased here at Amazon- Losing Someone You Love
Susan reading from A Stunning Absence, poems for all who grieve.
POETRY BY SUSAN
Where Bach Takes Me: Concerto #5
As printed in Common Ground Review 2014
Wisteria
2009 Award Winning Poem
On The Meaning Of Things
2007 Award Winning Poem
(click on title to download pdf)