AnitaBarcsaPhotography_DanielleSalk-2021

Message from Danielle

I started writing poetry when I was nine years old. We had a visiting poet in Mrs. Miller’s fifth grade classroom. It changed my life.

Much of the spoken word you will listen to is stream of consciousness or automatic writing, hurriedly scratched out with pen and paper in a blank journal and timed for typically 12-20 minutes. It is rarely and only ever minimally edited; it comes straight from the heart.

The shorter poems are often crafted directly on the computer and because they are typed, they have a different flavor. I hope you will enjoy what you read. I do love “jumping off points” so if there is a topic you would like to hear about, please let me know. It’d be fun to give it a shot.

Meet Danielle

My holy roller...

My holy roller, I've spent long stretches of my life in a church. White doves, holy Bible, Psalms on Sundays, then Tibetan bells on Tuesdays. Same church, different teacher. God, an idea I had when I was born. I wanted to be a preacher, standing crisp in some black and white spats, my pleated trousers, deep they were, these pockets filled with gold. "Come to the Lord!" I would holler, tip-top dance across the hot Alabama linoleum, the jello's been spilled and cleaned to spit-

Soup

I am forever fighting the unforgiving and tattered face of time. Tick-tocking like a barking dog at my heels. I have already sold the slim slots between every hour to things that no longer seem important. I am trying not to just squeeze you in to the agenda of doing. You with your quiet composure of slow movements suspended beside me. You having always asked for me to be with you in ways I couldn't understand. Today I am listening to the song wanting to be sung, the metrono

In The Beginning

In the beginning there was gasoline and too much stress. The weight of a thousand sorrows strapped across his back, too much for one man to bear. That would be Grandpa Robison, my grandfather's dad, my mother's grandfather, this fatherhood being passed down through two poor hands stretched out across the garage, reaching. How for the sheer will of not being able to endure the depression, he picked up that can of gasoline, that rust in the garage for emergencies can of gasolin

danielle

At Esalen

In 1949, communist China took the heart out of love. They were trying to make the written language more accessible to the illiterate, to open up the world to those who did not yet have access to books and directions, to writing letters to lost loved ones. Reading poetry perhaps to a devoted wife, to coloring large folios with "Happy Birthday" to a child you have always loved, with or without the symbols, the black on white, the elegant stroke of brush-on calligraphy. There's

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“To be yourself, as you are, child, that is the difficult choice. The road less traveled, being willing to fill your boots with the very feet you are walking on, no socks included, bandageless, blistered, alive.”

― Danielle Salk

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