Katharyn Machan
Cleanse My Soul, Renew Me, Lead Me into Hydration
Misguided, wrongly told to seek me out,
the alien that must have come from Mars
or Venus (or someplace beyond the stars
no one’s imagined yet in our time’s doubt)
stood tall before me, on its mouth(?) a pout
that took me back to high school’s hated jars
of drenched amphibians, the thin black bars
on mottled skin we had to poke about.
Small me? A hopeful poet often dry
with inspiration fleeing from my pen?
A human being always asking why
and who and how and where and what and when?
I sighed, and sadly smiled, and shook my head:
poor creature, to be heartlessly misled.
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The title is gratefully borrowed from the last line of Sonnet from the Psalms: Psalm 145 (Verse 1), a poem by Barbara Crooker in her collection from Pittsburgh University Press, Some Glad Morning.
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Since 1977 Katharyn Howd Machan, picking up where Rod Serling left off, has taught creative writing at Ithaca College in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. Her specialty courses, besides in poetry and memoir, have been Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy, Women and Fairy Tales, and first-year seminars called Fairy Tales: The Hero’s Journey. Her poems have appeared in many magazines, anthologies, and textbooks, and in 40 published collections, most recently A Slow Bottle of Wine (winner of the Jessie Bryce Niles Award from The Comstock Writers, Inc., 2020) and Dark Side of the Spoon (The Moonstone Press, 2022).
Author’s Notes/Backstory: In late 2019, just before the Covid-19 virus hit the United States, my longtime poet friend Barbara Crooker’s full-length book, Some Glad Morning, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Very sadly, the pandemic prevented her from engaging in her planned promotional tour. But I eagerly read her poems, and as a source of solace during isolation, in tribute to her, on 22 June of 2020 I began a series of my own which I have named Lines from Barbara, gratefully borrowing her last lines to use as my titles. My poems are not in direct response to hers; I allowed her words to mingle with my imagination and what I was living at the time I wrote each one. Working gradually, I completed the series on 25 June 2023. I thank Barbara for her powerfully beautiful collection that helped to give me courage through those dark three years!
“Cleanse My Soul, Renew Me, Lead Me into Hydration” is the only SF one in the book—but what else could it be with that title, eh?
Editor’s Comments: The “solace during insolation” in Kathryn’s Petrarchan sonnet might be captured in the abstract (by Steve Johnson on Pexels) where the colors might be interpreted as a collage of emotions.