Live Encounters Poetry & Writing July 2025
City Of Shadow And Light, poems by Kaaren Kitchell.
City Of Shadow And Light
(Report from Paris, after October 7, 2023)
Sorrow shows its face in strange oblique ways.
Mother and child blaring as if through bullhorns
in the small Chinese market on rue Monge.
The North African guard at the pharmacy
knocking over a forklift
that almost severed someone’s foot.
The clerk at the bio store who won’t meet
anyone’s gaze. The neighbor hustling home
with groceries in an anxious haze.
Muslim men scanning faces for judgment.
Something hectic, disturbed in the clusters
of students and friends in sidewalk cafés.
Mocking punks emboldened by the violence
far away—a continent!—
(so close).
Dreams of long ago grief in Barcelona,
wrenched from the arms of my love by parents
who sought to save my teenage purity,
rescue the Virgin from the Dragon,
dragged me back to the desert, where I fell
into darkness at home, leaden with shame.
A year later I bolted. What virgin? What dragon?
Remnants of Christian faith—they weren’t even believers.
I followed my blazing life north and inward,
forged my own myth.
How can the horrors exploding in the Holy Land
be so interwoven with our lives here?
Centuries of religious madness.
There is no space, no time,
in this city of shadow and light.
Merle
Past Dante and Montaigne, there she is!—
the sweetest dawn singer in Paris.
She’s black with a plump worm in her yellow beak
facing the bower of pink roses around Ronsard
whose lines I first read at nineteen in New York
long before I’d pass him every day on rue des Écoles.
Epic poet, essayist, lyric poet, blackbird—
four great singers—be with me as I write!
Zeus Attack
When a swordfish leaps out of the sea
near Indonesia and pierces a woman’s breast,
a shapely glowing woman in red tank suit,
a champion surfer, Giulia Manfrini,
I think, it’s probably Zeus, up to his old tricks,
shapeshifting, disguising himself
so he can savor a succulent
morsel of female pulchritude.
She dies instantly. Or maybe she’s changed
into something else—a Flying Fish who skims the waves?—
to escape the King of the Gods, as Daphne did Apollo,
freezing into the form of a laurel tree.
Daphne, fleeing from love,
became the emblem of victory.
Giulia, where are you now?
What have you become?
Diamonds And Rust
I was Crane Dancing
to Diamonds and Rust
and her voice took me back
to that tiny house in Phoenix
they bought on the G.I. bill
where my mother played records by Joan Baez
long before Bob appeared on the scene.
She, the Madonna with high clear voice
sang of causes, kept her feelings to herself,
except in this most vulnerable of songs
that is all yearning, all truth of the heart,
the snow falling all around them in Washington Square.
My mother was Joan the Madonna. I was vagabond Bob.
We loved each other like diamonds.
And then the years of rust.
Now?
Now there is only tenderness between us,
and the ache of her loss.
© Kaaren Kitchell
Kaaren Kitchell’s poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Jung Journal Winter-Spring 2023, anthologies, and in a fine art manuscript at the Getty Museum. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University, LA. She and her late husband, Richard Beban, taught Living Mythically at the C.G. Jung Institute in L.A., at Esalen in Big Sur, and in private workshops, based on her 30-year vision quest. A collection of her essays and his photos can be found at www.parisplay.com. Her most recent book of poems is Ariadne’s Threads. She lives in Paris, France, and Berkeley, California. She can be reached at ariadnesweb@msn.com
Good stuff, thoughtful, imaginative, satisfying.
I really appreciate your response, Dirk. Thank you so much.