This week's Poet of the People is my friend, the poet, Miho Kinnas. Miho's poetry makes distant lands feel familiar… just around the corner, up the street and within reach.
Wildflowers
Northern Ireland
From the stone pier
young men jump
feet first
into the Irish Sea
white skin turning pink.
They weren’t around when
the crescent moon rose in red.
Mackerels jump
beyond the outer jetty.
The clouds
wispy and broken.
Wind directions shift.
Scales reflect the weak sun.
An old weather saying:
They make tall ships carry low sails.
Bouquets of wildflowers
protect boundaries
from evil fairies.
Bright yellow ones are marsh marigold.
Pale ones primrose.
However, says ancient folklore:
the night scent of buttercup
may cause madness.
Two girls on the pavement
along the shuttered shops
learn to roller-skate
and not to hate
but to ask, why.
Helsinki
The engine hummed all night
like a 3-D printer
building the city.
In the darkest hour
of the white night
the ship jerked once.
Men in blue and yellow
uniforms hooked
the anchoring ropes.
On the pier a few workers
dragged the covered cargo
on wheels slowly across.
The container trucks
that had gone first
in Stockholm filed out.
The ferry continues
the Baltic voyage
the thick fog is lifting.
Seagulls reappear
in the leftover sunrise
suddenly.
The maritime fortress
built in the eighteenth-century
Suomenlinna
punctuates the history
obscures the earlier times
and reminds of the present war.
Nearing the harbor
more gulls circle.
I approach Helsinki from the sea.
The Pitch
Five mornings in a row, my mother tells me about her dreams.
She keeps dreaming about her childhood in Manchuria.
Like the silhouette on the revolving lantern.
Kaleidoscopic.
The sun was stunning dipping into the horizon!
How thick the ice was on the lake in the forest!
Did I tell you about the stolen skates we found
at the thieves’ market in the morning?
In one of the last dreams I heard
she was a thirteen-year-old entrepreneur.
She and her friends sold cigarettes to passersby
near the Harbin bridge.
Our sales pitch was in Chinese and Russian!
Choyan ma? Su-kirt?
Choyan ma? Su-kirt?
I may die soon.
If you leave now I won’t see you again.
I didn’t believe her.
I still hear her voice repeating the pitch
with a chuckle in between.
Yokohama
I am drawing a map
to my parents’ house on the hill.
The scale is confused.
There are many inaccuracies.
A little corner fruit shop is now a pet store.
Time may be psychological.
My boyfriend was always late.
Older taxi drivers know the tomb-stone cutter.
Young ones know it like a ghost story.
The road zips through the fire station.
The big chestnut tree
no longer there where all summer
cicadas spent their one week on earth.
They were so loud —we often gave up talking, listened
to them rolling our eyes to each other and broke into a big laughter.
That shut them up!
One day coming home from school a concrete pole blocked
our view of the hill. My mother complained to the electric company.
It is still there.
A boy threw a pebble at my window. I was on the phone
with another boy. I draw a little heart.
All three hearts were broken.
My mother served bowls of ramen noodle for my friends
complete with pork, eggs, sesame seeds, scallions
seaweed and spinach.
My mother began taking rests
on the way up the hill
the way my father did in his late years.
The day I saw my mother for the last time
she staggered out of the house without a cane.
I am fine, I am fine, don’t worry, I ‘m fine. I draw a stick figure.
With her open sky smile she held onto the edge of the fence with her right
hand, her left hand sparkled a little. I draw her waving hand.
She watched my brother drive me away.
The Difficulties of Open Water Swimming
It was more turbulent
than it appeared. But that
was not the only difficulty.
Pelicans glide by
one after another
sometimes low.
She blends in, assimilates
appears as an image
in someone else’s success.
Moon straight up.
Eastern horizon deep.
Red of a rose garden.
She discarded garlands.
Change of heart.
Nothing stays still.
The sky abandons every color.
Someone stepped
into the ocean as
she made up her mind.
It’s in the genes, we say
as if she is a bag of tricks.
Did she think he was
a trick of light?
Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Miho Kinnas is a poet, writer, and translator. Her poems, translations, essays and book reviews appeared in various journals and anthologies including Best American Poetry 2023. She leads creative writing workshops at various locations including writers.com, New York Writers Workshop, and local schools. Her third book of poetry Waiting for Sunset to Bury Red Camellias will be published by Free Verse Press this year.