Vox Populi
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Kari Gunter-Seymour: Last Night the Chime Of Tree Frogs
Granny Woman dances
under breeze-shivering branches,
her skirts a waltz of wings,
mouth full of stories.
She has emptied her house of men.
.
Out the side of her eye
the soft blur of rabbit,
and watchful dusk,
air ripe with herbs
and tinctures, the echo
of gasping roots.
.
She is the nighthawk,
sprung from chalky shell,
issuing her raspy bee-yoot
for all the names she gives the night,
surviving passages so narrow
they felt like birth canals,
every dawn she can remember
crushed between her teeth.
.
She will cradle you,
deliver you
from one mud to the next.
Anointer, holder
of upended petals
and misplaced halos,
I saw her in the dark morning,
glimmer and dust.
From A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen by Kari Gunter-Seymour (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions 2020).
Kari Gunter-Seymour is the Poet Laureate of Ohio.
Three mountain women spinning yarn, 1939. The healers have traditionally served mountain communities. TENNESSEE STATE LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES
Vox Populi 
I have reason to believe my great grandma used herbs in Germany
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Oh, how much I LOVE your work, Kari. Well you know that. But this poem is particularly dear to me, because the granny women in deepest, darkest, rural German – my granny women – were the same. Loving you with rough hands, sneaking you a treat when nobody was looking (couldn’t appear weak now, could they), and with gruff voices and defiance: “We said it when the Nazis were in power we say it now with the Bosheviks. What more can they do to us?” Honest, brave, and ‘ emptied their houses of men.” How I loved them.
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The granny women. Me? House emptied of men. The herbs. The moon. Echoes in the house. Plague outside the door.
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HA! I’ve never thought of you as a granny woman, but maybe it fits.
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Sister poets, yes?
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Well-said, Rose Mary.
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Oh, Rosemarie!
Thank you for this! May we always find strength in ourselves, each other and all that the land provides!
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