Sherry Chandler

I first met Brenda White in 2000 when we were both in Jim Hall’s master poet workshop sponsored by the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Lexington and funded by the YMCA National Writers Voice. People came from all around to attend that workshop — Paris, Georgetown, Cynthiana. But Brenda got the prize. She drove all the way from Somerset once a week for 12 weeks. Brenda has had pieces in all three of the Kentucky Feminist Writers series: Writing Who We Are: Poems by Kentucky Feminists, Telling Stories: Fiction by Kentucky Feminists, and most recently, I to I: Life Writing by Kentucky Feminists. Her poem “Late Suppers” is forthcoming in the Seattle Journal for Social Justice, in an issue devoted to the death penalty, and she will have an essay in the fall issue of Trillium. Brenda says:

I am beginning work tomorrow on a monologue about a local Indian legend, Princess Cornblossom, last Cherokee chief in this area. It will be a stretch for me — playwriting — but the story is too good and needs to be told so that local folks know some local history. I was astonished to find that only a handful of people know about her.

The poem below I recognized as an old friend from the Jim Hall workshop, so I asked Brenda for permission to reproduce it here. It seems very appropriate to the spring we’re having — especially yesterday’s norwester. The poem is from The Coffee Talk Quarterly for Winter 2005:

Late Snow

Spring had been declared for days
when winter mounted a coup,
the snow falling like silent missiles
ambushing in the night.
Spring went covert,
and we dove to the backs of closets
for coats and hats we’d cleaned and stowed.
For days, we watched the snow stack up,
hostages to this war of seasons, counting
the mounting casualties – azaleas,
lilacs, tulips, our purple iris,
our neighbor’s magnolia tree.

Finally, spring managed a maneuver,
brought out her big gun, the sun, aimed
his singular eye at the enemy below.
Winter began a slow retreat, the snow melting
inch by inch,
farther and farther,
until all we could see was a swatch of white
shimmering in the sun
like a little flag waving surrender.