Please join us Thursday, March 5, 2020 at 7:00 pm, when poets Faith D. Kindness and Elizabeth S. Wolf will continue the thirteenth season of the Collected Poets Series! Mocha Maya’s Coffee House, 47 Bridge St, Shelburne Falls, MA. ($2-5 suggested donation)

Faith D. Kindness

As a young woman Faith Dickhaut Kindness was a visual artist and teacher. In the late 1960’s, she lived on Okinawa with her husband who was serving in the Army. The Art of Waiting, her first major publication, is a memoir about her experiences in the Vietnam War era, based on two years when life took a direction she hadn’t previously encountered and she simultaneously faced the two unknown mindsets of the military and of living in a foreign culture.

A long-time resident of Western Massachusetts, Kindness has been published locally in journals Equinox, Wise Woman Journal, and Silkworm. She has self-produced and hand-bound a few booklets of photos and poetry. Included in the Straw Dog Writers Guild anthology Compass Roads, Kindness has also placed as a finalist in the Franklin County Poet’s Seat Contest.

Elizabeth S. Wolf

Elizabeth S. Wolf is the author of three books: the 2018 Rattle Chapbook Contest winner Did You Know? (Rattle, 2019);  When Lawyers Wept (Kelsay Books, 2019); and What I Learned: Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Elizabeth’s poetry appears in multiple journals and anthologies, including Ibbetson Street, Tuck Magazine, Fiolet & Wing, and Persian Sugar in English Tea (in English & Farsi). Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize multiple times and she was a semi-finalist in the 2019 Joy Harjo Poetry Competition. Elizabeth has been a featured reader in Wales, around New England, and on the Rattlecast podcast.

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TRAVELING REPLICA OF THE VIETNAM MEMORIAL / F. D. Kindness

For those unable to visit Washington, the black
granite’s twin brother wall, on giant photo boards,
travels the nation. This stop Providence.

I’ve not seen the original, don’t expect the hush,
the intense feeling, the sobering effect conjured
as people seek names in guidebooks to locate

their relatives, friends, former classmates who’d sat
near them studying the nation’s history unaware
of their own. Flowers strewn, trinkets and post-it notes

placed in remembrance. Step by slow step, I walk
the statehouse grounds, overwhelmed by the density
of alphabet, the sheer yardage of lives listed here,

recognizing few names though the dead are my peers.
Daylight wanes. Candles flicker. Beacons illumine
bright names, stars shining against a dark sky.

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PRIMATE CUSTOMS / Elizabeth S. Wolf

The nice young Vietnamese scientist
working in the park with pygmy slow loris
could not believe I was travelling solo.
No family? No one to bring with you?
He had a lovely British- accented English
and was clearly concerned.

The next day I checked into a
charming hotel on the beach, on
the South China Sea, just beyond
a fishing village. The room number
was my mother’s street address.

I do not believe in coincidence.
I am not travelling alone.

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