Call – Environment, Theme of the Month

Response – Folk Lore Observed

– Floating Feathers, a Folk Art Poem

– by Mimi Peterson, WIR #17

Folk culture comes to pass thru generations. Friends gather to share ideas, they repeat news, tell tales of events, and, perhaps, anecdote the next project’s story board with pictographs and symbols, all grounded in collective experience. For many of us, such personal exchanges have been replaced by mass media whose current flow of random fact vs. fiction, and opinionated information often dictates a lack of humanity.

Folk art and lore has inspired many contemporary creatives to practice it as an alternative genre in order to combat the depersonalization and alienation in biased journalistic rhetoric. The layering of words and images leads to contemporary cultural inheritance. Poets and artists, audience and media, linked by cultural heritage, will twist and turn until we evolve as a new movement. We care about identity, ecology, equality, our future history. All are in peril. Floating Feathers as folk art, brings the past into the present, neither primitive nor bourgeois. Some words might remind you of stories heard before, it’s imagery is mine explored. Rooted in vernacular form, it is face-to-face story telling, crafted by hand, and meant to reexamine selfhood.

Floating Feathers

After the feathers fall from the Sky,
They chant that they are wings no more,
No attacks against Earth, only soft landings,
They chant, follow the floating feathers, 
Not the shafted arrow,
To the totem that sits on the green horizon.

The Blue Night Sky,
Twinkles so loud it hurts,
Lyrics rock memories to life,
Action is still happening,
Painted with star-aged plumes,
Offered by the totems.

Sea-levels give rise to wide winged myths,
Colorfast rosy currents,
Feathering down in double time,
Petals tap, tapping backwards,
Moonlit energy releases seismic waves,
Designed to sound warnings.

Before, the right hand played the melody,
Now, the steady left takes the lead,
Extreme highs fly low, mapping new again lines,
Nuanced intervals claim human domain,
Someplace between go faster, relax later,
But later will not arrive, we passed it. Turn West.

Sun shines bright, orange, sweet, warm.
Time is ahead, follow the feathers,
Trailing through Sky, touching Earth,
Feel the vibrations?
Bullets fly like feathers, hurt like Fire,
Wounded. I can't stand up. I'm bleeding.

Free range, out of range, depth of range,
Height + length + depth x spirit = perception,
Moments are over, monuments rise,
Meanings change by octaves,
Repeated motions cut stars by half.

Composer of dimensions,
Author of time,
Reconnect the deconstructed.
Listen - sweet orange sun,
Look - totems grow roses,
Stop - feathers feel like kisses.

“….the gradual erasure of communal narrative to the concomitant disappearance of the handicraft from the productive sphere…. face-to-face storytelling is an artisan form of communication, …. all the arts lose when stories are no longer retained…. It is becoming unraveled at all its ends after being woven thousands of years ago in the ambiance of the oldest forms of craftsmanship.” (Walter Benjamin, German philosopher, art writer, “The Storyteller”, essay, 1936)

Mimi Peterson