Celia Brown

Biographical Notes:

I came to the US from Ireland in the sixties. For many years I worked as a professionional nurse. I have lived in amazing parts of this land including Washington, DC; Hanover, NH; and even Alaska. Currently I reside on CapeCod. I also travel a lot worldwide, and will continue to do so as long as I can -- with my husband, an arctic researcher. We have two sons.

Learning the art of poetry is a lot more fun than studying to become a nurse. I began writing poetry formally after I returned to school to get a master's degree at Dartmouth in 1978. I was Jenny McKean scholar at George Washington University in 1991; I have read poetry in many venues including The Library of Congress. I have also been involved in poetry programs in schools and communities.

My poems have been published in magazines, newspapers, journals; these include: Visions International, Federal Poet, Irish Echo, The New Hampshire Times, Dartmouth Medicine, Maryland Poetry Review, Seattle Review, The Salmon (Ireland); more recent poems have appeared in Between the Heartbeats , an anthology by the Iowa Press; and I was published in Winners an anthology by Wordworks. Recently one of my poems appeared in the September issue of AJN : the American Journal of Nursing. In October, my autobiographical book, Mending the Skies was published by Fithian Press at Santa Barbara, CA. The poems below represent a sampling from that book.

My e-mail adress: celia@cape.com

The First Hour

The lie is longitudinal, the attitude is one of flexion, the presentation is vertex, the position is left occipito-anterior..." Textbook ForMidwives, by Margaret F. Miles

This will never happen to me
I vowed, shocked the first time
I saw a head pushing out
after a slight show and water
spurting, the attitude, right
and the vertex coming at me--
just like it said in Maggie Miles

Push! I urged, sweating harder
than the woman I was trying to deliver
who wasn't listening at all
but swearing out loud
and ranting about red tomatoes
and someone stealing
out of her garden. Push!

I said it again, but by then
it didn't matter, the head
had come out and the shoulder
was presenting on its own
the little body slithered
I grabbed the greasy pole of it
upside down, clearing the airway

Cut the cord, and don't panic
I coached myself, clamping
down hard in two places to sever
the ropey tube and catch
the blue, howling vigor
of that first hour in my two hands...
my shaky, learning hands.

Daffodil Days

I bought the daffodils
that ward off cancer.
They are new and unopened
as a visit to the next specialist.
The flowers are shy of X-ray,
of that large pressing force
that grinds against the petals
of the body, that light reaching in,
so cold as I hold my breath.
But hope is the height of the sun
in these bare trees reeling
around me.
Will these flowers open up?
I place them in a milk glass
on the evening's edge,
do not bloom for me I ask,
do not bloom.

By The Elephant
at the Smithsonian in DC

Buffered by his cap and coat
my uncle rose like a kite
for the third straight day in a row,
wafted on the backs of tourists
into the archways of Science.

That was my Uncle John for you,
hot from the Emerald Isle
in search of the Hope Diamond.
As he poked once more at the dinosaurs..

till slightly sorry I¹d brought
him at all, I promised
to meet him at the Elephant,

where sooner or later everyone
returns if only to find the exit,
or to wink at a trumpeting greyness
that crowns the white rotunda,

unbothered by kith or kin
as sunset lumbers into light.

Bright are the seven seas
in their jungles of tee-shirts and hats
that rush sixteen different ways,
having lost or found a relative
on the way to Natural History.

Michelangelo

My father climbed ladders,
mixed mortar and lime,
plastered the outsides of churches.
When the weather wasn't fine
he did inside stuff, courting
the thin high bluffs of all that was

dizzy and holy, as if he were seeking
a better angle on God.
He pebble-dashed till the crows
cawed evening, bevelled the archways,
spangled the domes so the parish
could pray in color.

My father, dusty as flour itself,
climbed down from the ladder
to sing Galway Bay.
The Harp That Once, his glass held tall.
Moonlight Becomes You, Perfect Day,
a spattered angel in his overalls.

My father loved smoothing old
stone at a height.
Each hard day like an act;
with his mortar-board heaped--
all those clouds to be patched.
Off too far, way up there death itself
was no more than the crack
that my father could fix if he tried.

Even after his eyes
were like broken stars,
all he knew was a trowel,
he could mend the skies.