Poems by Lennie Hay

Sound Travel: 
Jazz Weekend at Pleasant Hill*

A melody climbs out of a sax, takes a piano’s hand, taps drums then squeezes
past my eyes out my nose, sneaks up my throat and over my teeth
to spill all over the still-green grass, trees, dried cornfield and shrubs
making them shake in ecstasy as the residents here once danced

to honor their god and community. Miles Davis, John Coltrane, 
Benny Goodman, Cab Calloway deliver music from New Orleans, 
Kansas City, Chicago to 200 year-old ground in central Kentucky.
Musicians and audience rouse trees to swing

and dip, clouds to rise and explode in a jazz dance.
Sound-limbs embrace us. Youthful musicians join
white-haired legends, offer familiar melodies and improvise riffs.
Notes jump fences, scrape gravel paths, find two cows grazing, 

mooing their response.  Crisp building lines 
and simple furniture echo clean tones passed from sax
to piano. Unexpected breaks weave elegant baskets, 
smooth wooden bowls spun from major to blue notes. 

Shakers rise from the dead to lift shoulders, 
tap loosened feet, stretch angel arms 
towards America’s music.  
--


*A historic Village and farm once home to a communal society of farmers and craftspeople.  They came to be known as Shakers because of their early energetic worship in music and dance. 

Honoring River Sounds


I am a shaman from a village in Hunan province.
My four-thousand-year-old language speaks to the clouds,
the wind, and what sickness lives inside us. 

I speak Schoenberg, Glass, Takemitsu,
paper, pots, water more water, and rural prayers. 

I grew in the river and conjure its moods and spray: 
	wash basin
	laundry tub
	public bath
	liquid game board
	path home. 

Stones and brushes grate clothing
purified in the stream.
That sound whispers to me. 

Arms exhale in and out of water.
Pings and plops of drops 
find my face.

I shuffle in the shallow water,
let my feet talk to it. 

Sky water pools flood the rice fields. 
I clutch the primal liquid
running from my fingers to my ears.

For audiences in New York, Shanghai,
Tampa and Helsinki,
I fill glass bowls with your sweetness,
shine blue lights to undress your depths.

You are my instrument I tap, pluck,
smack, and flick your skin.
I press wooden bowls to break
your surface.  Find your deep rhythm
with mallet or spoon. 

I hoist a sunken colander to hear
a hundred tiny streams bounce
on your tense surface.

I strike with spatula, brush. 
My hair, face and arms taste you.

I lower a gong in your richness,
strike,
lower again, 
strike, 
summon the audience
and my ancestors.

--

*Tan Dun composed Water Concerto for Water Percussion and Orchestra in 1998. 

American Politeness


May I ask a personal question?  they say.  I am weary 
of strangers’ assumed right to know me.  My weight?  
Religious preference?  Sexual orientation?  I chuckle
silently, weighing an answer—this time. Raised docile 

I smile yes.  Where are you from?  always the follow-up. 
Their false politeness prompts my answers 
meant to confuse:  Minot, Crookston, Minneapolis, 
then Kentucky.  Where I was born, grew up, got educated 

and learned how fellow citizens position 
me outside their landscape, 
pin me on a map in a foreign place for those 
who have silky black-hair, pale skin, eyes like mine.  

I prolong my naiveté. My interrogators squirm 
in confusion and discomfort.  They hope
that people who look like me took a boat here, 
or flew—adopted—to the Land of the Free.

I acquiesce—as if I did not speak their language:
Oh . . . you mean what is my ethnicity.  
My father immigrated from China.
My mother was the daughter of German/Russian immigrants. 

 I was born on the plains of North Dakota,
 near wheat fields and under endless skies—
I hope they feel my words
like a slammed door
like a gut punch.

Displacement*


after Dylan Thomas’ “Do not go gentle into that good night”
	


Long after Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Dachau we do
try to forget the stink from ovens but not
the smell of 300 bodies in Lsychansk. Go
back to Russia.  Take your missiles and tanks. Gentle
years here end      with explosions. We are carried into
ambulances       our lives in bundles that
become our oxygen           perhaps our good
morning awaits as we flee the Ukrainian night. 

We search for van, bus, train to escape the old
neighborhood     our crying babies age
in our arms.  Their grandparents should
see them grow in Maripol or lviv. Not watch fields burn,
homes collapse, black smoke rise over roads and
rails, choke their present.     We listen to the past, rave
against today’s brutality.    Decry lives threatened at
Kharkiv and Kyiv.     We watch the doors close
on what’s familiar       approach refuge of 
kind strangers.      Warsaw and Berlin welcome us this day.

After Taros Shevchenko,* our poets show us rage.
He told us—It’s terrible to lie in chains—so they rage
with new words to defend our souls against
despair—I pretend death doesn’t exist—says the
poet Shuvalova.*      Lies and fears dying
in the face of words—poets’ guns and tanks.  Poet of
war, Savka speaks—The Resurrection, it seems, is off schedule*—the
people rise, break chains with their light.

--

*Golden shovel poem.
*Taros Shevchenko a 19th century Ukrainian painter-poet told the story of the indigenous people of Ukraine in their native tongue.  Consequently, he was imprisoned by the Russian empire
*Living in China, contemporary Ukrainian poet and scholar Iryna Shuvalova writes of her country’s struggles and her response so far removed from the battles.
*From Ukrainian writer Marjana Savka’s untitled poem posted on her Facebook page, April 23, 2022.

About the Poet:

Lennie Hay is a 2019 MFA graduate of Spalding University. She grew up in the Midwest between two cultures—Chinese immigrants and German Ukrainian farmers. A former educator, she lived in Louisville for nearly 50 years and now lives on the water in Southern Indiana and in Florida drawing energy from visual art, her family’s history, and music. haylennie@gmail.com