Donna J. Snyder
Donna Snyder, founder of the Tumblewords Project, has published her work in such journals as Puerto Del Sol and Sin Fronteras, among others across the western US. She has presented hundreds of creative writing workshops as an artist in the schools in the El Paso/Las Cruces region, various local literary festivals, and as a Tumblewords Poet. She has been a featured artist in such performance events and venues as the Taos Poetry Circus, the Border Book Festival, El Paso Museum of Art’s Museo-Literati reading series, the Branigan Library Authors Series, Umbilicus Mundi, the South Broadway Cultural Center in Albuquerque, the Out on a Limb series at the Santa Fe Actor’s Theater, and the Texas Kick-Ass Poets tour. Her work as an artist, cultural and political organizer, and grassroots lawyer has been featured in articles in the El Paso Times, Bridge Review, Albuquerque Journal, Stanton Street, Alamogordo Daily News, and the Las Cruces Sun. She has worked 22 years as an advocate for immigrants, farm workers, garment workers, indigenous people, and people with mental and physical disabilities. In 2002 she won the Emma Tenayuca prize for her human rights work.
Feather of death
I. Remembered strength
Out of the turquoise foam a magician rises
wheels around
His cloak blossoms around his shoulders
Feather of death
It’s one more time around the bitter wheel
Dust shimmers with remembered strength
A dying lion shudders
clambers over doomed swans
Thrusts a naked head into memory’s wildest moments
Crimson berries gather in the house of the heart
Four chambers shut one after another
Strength remembered
Tree limbs shake against a bleached sky
Like death
Not doom
Just death
II. Grief
My mouth won’t form words
I’m not sure about pearly gates
Or if there is a better place awaiting
somewhere in some sweet bye & bye
All I see is white blue sky that hurts my eyes
Rutted earth packed hard and unforgiving
Chamisa too dry to give up its sweet smell
Empty river a bed unmade and hard to lie in
There is a face the color of ash
carved by the elemental forces
Gray white hair on the head of the old one
A silver lion dying
One more time around the bitter wheel
A man stays young as long
as someone needs no excuse to show affection
A woman stays young as long as she moves her body with joy
A fool sees beauty only in the dewey young
Believes only the young & firm give pleasure to the senses
Thinks only youth deserves the ecstasies
found in a life fully lived
Look at this world
It’s as old as dirt
Yet even when it craves a humid embrace
its ancient beauty dazzles
Like the sight of angels in all their angel glory
bent down to stroke thirsting flesh with an incandescent kiss
III. Wheel within the wheel
My mind ceases to make thought
At that place where public life shoves itself
into what should be secret
I fall deep into a panic that stems
from a sense of being vulnerable to the pack
I tumble into a turquoise lake
Each gasp fills my lungs with murky doom
I open and close my mouth like a fan of feathers
Drowned in moonlight
Darkness fractured by light and water
To be alone in the endless abyss
without anticipation of haven --
The unconscious thought stops the suck of darkness into my lungs
I cease to flail
My feet become cold as mountain rain
My eyelids flutter like snow blankets over frozen ponds
My ankles wear bracelets of water-woven grass
My feet touch down on shifting sand and sodden debris
My hands float above my head like naked wings
When they reach the surface they float like lace on air
A cloak blossoms around my shoulders
Warm flesh wraps itself around this failing body
Pulls me up and out of milky death
Beyond the gloom of sorrow & fear
My pale face breaks the dark waters
Smiles at the moon
dancing bright
against the blackest beauty of the windblown sky
