The Last of Her Village

“My horoscope advises: notice connections to your childhood
home. Women and men the age my parents were
when they died are everywhere.
One has my mother’s hands. She weaves insights
like soft cloth, holding it to my shoulders when I chill.”

This is the ending of a magical, fearless poem called “Festival of Lights Revisited” by Yael Flusberg. (In March 2010, Yael dazzled my students at New College of Florida when I invited her to be a Guest Poet there. I took this photograph during her New College reading.)

Yael is a yoga teacher, a healer, and a writer. You can hear her talk about braiding these three roles together in a radio essay that aired on WAMU, American University Radio:
Therapy And Yoga At Walter Reed

On the first day of autumn, last September, "Festival of Lights Revisited" arrived in my mailbox, as part of Yael's first poetry chapbook. I have read all the chapbook's poems before. Some of them, a half-dozen times. I sat down that fall equinox and read them again. (A poem is never to be read just once, nor twice.)  As I prepare to spend a week with Yael in her home in Washington DC, some of her poetic lines are scrolling through my mind.  

The Last of My Village is a collection about moving through a year, moving through a life, letting what is not needed fall away, and learning not to need what has fallen away.

The Last of My Village won Poetica Magazine’s 2010 Chapbook Prize. Read it.