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