Diane Frank is an award-winning poet and author of six books of poems, including Swan Light, Entering the Word Temple, and The Winter Life of Shooting Stars. Her friends describe her as a harem of seven women in one very small body. She lives in San Francisco, where she dances, plays cello, and creates her life as an art form. Diane teaches at San Francisco State University and Dominican University. She leads workshops for young writers as a Poet in the Schools and directs the Blue Light Press On-line Poetry Workshop. Blackberries in the Dream House, her first novel, won the Chelson Award for Fiction and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.  Her new novel, Yoga of the Impossible, was an Amazon bestseller for metaphysical fiction, and #1 on their Hot New Releases list. She is editor of River of Earth and Sky: Poems for the 21st Century, a top-selling anthology of 100 poets. Her website is www.dianefrank.net

Iowa Omen

Three hawks fly south
    as your voice trembles
          across the great plains.

Fields of sleeping cows
    a gentleness in the land.

Here is the omen:
    Sky splashed with aurora,
           blue stars, curtains of light.

The letters are gold
     on red silk –
           Japanese calligraphy.

If I had the right kind of ink
     I’d write them
           on your skin.

From Swan Light: Poems by Diane Frank

Requiem

            For Edie

The door opens on Tuesday.
On Friday she walks away from the world.  
I saw them at the Symphony,
Brahms and one hundred voices around them.
He was wearing a black suit with a top hat,
she in a long silk evening gown,
his arm softly around her shoulder.
They waved at me from a high window
and then they walked into the stars.

Nobody else could see them
but they waved at me
from a high box in the air.
In the fortissimo,
low pedal tones of the organ
vibrated the ceiling and the walls,
and in the quiet moments
one hundred voices hummed
the chord of the earth
as it turned.  

In another world,
she is skating on a river
in the rose pink of sunset or dawn.  
A fox fur hat around her face
keeps her warm, sheltering her
as a cottonwood tree from thunder.
These memories comfort as a soft pillow,
green and cool, a meadow
glowing with wild irises and daffodils,
the path through the forest where you walked,  
where the leaves of your life
glow like rhapsodies at your feet.

From Swan Light: Poems by Diane Frank

Igneous

Eat this stone
from the kitchen of the earth
Toss it into the magma
of a volcano

Marinate
the boulder
Slide it into a stone pie
to be baked
in Earth’s oven
Doing what it does best

Skip this stone
over a crater lake
water in the mouth
of the igneous
soup

Wear a garnet tie
a ruby ring, shale shoes
a tiara of opals
luminous with dreams

And like a child
humming a stone tune
searching for a path of pebbles
through the geckos, the dinosaurs  
in the fairy/folk tale
where the Earth is singing,
put it in your pocket

Walk out of the forest
where rhododendron trees
map hexagons of blossoms
under your footsteps

And let the stone
in your pocket
whisper its secrets
to the moon
to the shower of asteroids
to the singing sky

© 2016 Diane Frank