Pamela Uschuk is a poet, political activist, and wilderness advocate. She is also a cancer survivor, and in this week's segment of KNAU's series PoetrySnaps!, she shares a poem that moves through the experience and endurance of chemotherapy. Uschuk says her poem Green Flame was inspired by one particular sight in nature.
Pamela Uscuk:
Finding a dead Hummingbird while I was undergoing chemotherapy for stage three ovarian cancer. It's a tough kind of cancer to have, and the chemotherapy was tough also. I was undergoing that at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix at the time I wrote this poem. I wrote poems during my cancer and during my chemotherapy to save my life. I watched birds to keep my spirits going and to take my mind off of pain.
Green Flame
Slender as my ring finger, the female hummingbird crashed
into plate glass separating her and me
before we could ask each other’s name. Green flame,
she launched from a dead eucalyptus limb.
Almost on impact, she was gone, her needle beak
opening twice to speak the abrupt language of her going,
taking in the day’s rising heat as I took
one more scalding breath, horrified by death’s velocity.
Too weak from chemo not to cry
for the passage of her emerald shine,
I lifted her weightlessness into my palm.
Mourning doves moaned, who, who,
oh who while her wings closed against the tiny body
sky would quick forget as soon as it would forget mine
About the author:
Pamela Uschuk is an Arizona-based poet, political activist, and wilderness advocate. She is the author of seven books of poetry, including Crazy Love, winner of a 2010 American Book. Her work has been translated into dozens of languages and appears in over 400 journals and anthologies worldwide.
About the host:
Steven Law is a poet, journalist and educator based in Page, Arizona. He is the author of a collection of poems called Polished.
About the music:
Original music by Flagstaff-based band Pilcrowe.
