SAMANTHA TERRELL - POET / EIC, SHINE Poetry Series
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MICHAEL DICKEL

3/2/2023

 
This week's featured poet is Michael Dickel. Michael is an award-winning writer, educator, and editor. It's an honor to feature three of his poems today, including "Extinction Event" which previously appeared in The BeZine (March 2021). Please be sure to check out his Bio (below) for more details about his books and outstanding accomplishments. Thank you, Michael!

Fast-talking Slow-walking

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Extinction Event

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23. July. XX

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A poet, artist, fiction writer, publication editor, educator & photographer, Michael Dickel's creative work appears widely in print & online. He edits The BeZine online quarterly. He taught at David Yellin Academic College of Education, Jerusalem, The Hebrew University, Bar Ilan University, and in the US at Macalester College, the University of Minnesota, and Metropolitan State Universiry-MN. His poetry has won international awards & been translated into several languages. His most recent poetry collection, Nothing Remembers, came out from Finishing Line Press in September 2019, and received a Feathered Quill Book Award for Poetry. He has a chapbook, Breakfast at the End of Capitalism (Locofo Chaps, 2017) and a flash fiction collection, The Palm Reading after The Toad’s Garden (Is a Rose Press, 2016), among other prior books. With Israeli producer / director David Fisher, he received an NEH grant and wrote a film script about Yiddish theatre.


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    SHINE - International Poetry Series

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    Click here for submissions and more
    From the international poetry community, we have a "luxury of stars," as Sylvia Plath might say, and it is SHINE's honor to provide a home for their words with the online Spotlight series as well as SHINE Quarterly. Click on the logo above to learn more. And...keep writing, keep shining!
    In poetry,
    Samantha Terrell, EIC
    SYLVIA PLATH
    Stars Over the Dordogne

    Stars are dropping thick as stones into the twiggy
    Picket of trees whose silhouette is darker
    Than the dark of the sky because it is quite starless.
    The woods are a well. The stars drop silently.
    They seem large, yet they drop, and no gap is visible.
    Nor do they send up fires where they fall
    Or any signal of distress or anxiousness.
    They are eaten immediately by the pines.

    Where I am at home, only the sparsest stars
    Arrive at twilight, and then after some effort.
    And they are wan, dulled by much travelling.
    The smaller and more timid never arrive at all
    But stay, sitting far out, in their own dust.
    They are orphans. I cannot see them. They are lost.
    But tonight they have discovered this river with no trouble,
    They are scrubbed and self-assured as the great planets.

    The Big Dipper is my only familiar.
    I miss Orion and Cassiopeia's Chair. Maybe they are
    Hanging shyly under the studded horizon
    Like a child's too-simple mathematical problem.
    Infinite number seems to be the issue up there.
    Or else they are present, and their disguise so bright
    I am overlooking them by looking too hard.
    Perhaps it is the season that is not right.

    And what if the sky here is no different,
    And it is my eyes that have been sharpening themselves?
    Such a luxury of stars would embarrass me.
    The few I am used to are plain and durable;
    I think they would not wish for this dressy backcloth
    Or much company, or the mildness of the south.
    They are too puritan and solitary for that--
    When one of them falls it leaves a space,

    A sense of absence in its old shining place.
    And where I lie now, back to my own dark star,
    I see those constellations in my head,
    Unwarmed by the sweet air of this peach orchard.
    There is too much ease here; these stars treat me too well.
    On this hill, with its view of lit castles, each swung bell
    Is accounting for its cow. I shut my eyes
    And drink the small night chill like news of home.

    ~~~

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  • ABOUT
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  • SHINE Poetry Series