local_library Futurists

by Annetta Dexter Sawyer

Published in Issue No. 200 ~ January, 2014

4 o’clock in the morning

and the rains don’t stop

 

water keeps pouring

from the sky

helps keep away the drought

 

other parts

see no rain at all

just hot winds that keep

fires

keep fires

keep fires

burning

 

monsoons in Asia

cyclones typhoons

earthquake in Near East Far East

tsunamis too tornado hurricane

volcanoes fuming

 

I shouted this out

in madness and hurt

 

found my rage on Victory Bridge

on Victory Bridge over Verona’s Adige

out of the Alps ice and snow

the S of its curve marking passage as I shouted

one

with winds’ word

stood next to my father sage of World War

and together we missed my mother

Dead from violent cancer that ate away at her

 

vernal wind swept

over us

World War Two

built this victory for us

 

earth plates shift sink and rise

still rain keeps coming down

 

pure sun clean sky

then heat suffocates and engulfs all the people

about us

evening breeze just yesterday so sweet

not cold not hot

 

I thought I saw dark clouds approaching from my

rearview mirror

always present somehow passing

from before to the future beginning

I cross Victory Bridge

and Adige in Verona again

on banks of running river

place of Roman amphitheater

feudal star-crossed love and

monument to my future place where my parents rest

 

water rushes from our sky

they are now ash

account_box More About

Annetta Dexter Sawyer is an awarded teaching artist with the Arts & Humanities Council of Montgomery County and an awarded poet for the Arlington Humanities Project pick-a-poet public school residency program. She works as a college professor in the areas of Fine Arts, Dance, Theatre, and Interdisciplinary Studies/Integrated Arts. As a performing artist she recently received critical acclaim for her role as Miss Collins in Portrait of a Madonna for Washington Shakespeare Company’s Tennessee Williams Continuum. She is an Associate Artist with Faction of Fools Theatre Company, recipient of the Helen Hayes/John Aniello Award for emerging new theater company. Sawyer devises her original theatre pieces that speak to her personal experience through choreography, spoken word, props, and projected imagery. Her workshops Healing Movement/Healing Stories tm, Art for Everyone, and Drama: Movement, Expression, & Language Arts have been awarded by Arts for the Aging, Inc. Her newest endeavors are physical theatre collaborations in buffoon & clown with Stephen Lampredi & a dance/theatre improvisation class at Glen Echo Arts Park in cooperation with the Glen Echo Park Partnership for Arts & Culture, Inc., the National Park Service & Montgomery County, Maryland. Her latest readings were with Café Muse/Word Works, Joaquin Miller Series, College Park Library Readings, Takoma Park Poetry Series, & performance art pieces, A Different Language & an excerpt from Modern World Woman for DC SWAN DAY.