Dianna Henning and her husband, Kam, live on six acres in a forest of oaks and ponderosa pines. Over two decades ago, she started the Thompson Peak Writers’ Workshop, a small community of mostly fiction and memoir writers. She recently led poetry workshops for Lassen Aurora Network in Susanville, CA, funded by Poets & Writers, and was delighted by the beauty in the poems written by people who don’t normally write poetry.
Season of Want
I want to hold the green field in my lap,
stroke it like a sleeping cat, the ugly
“For Sale” sign permanently retired. I want
run-off for geese to remain
open water; no pavement
entombing the land. Near
my home grasses sway in their
river of wind, cows plod through streamlets. Such
happiness is mine to race across the field, to kite
myself into the heavens. O, field
of my reverie, the geese
nest in your lap, and with night’s arrival, the sky
spreads its rosary of stars.
Dianna Henning is a three-time Pushcart nominee who has been published in The Moth, Ireland; Sukoon, Volume 5; Mojave River Review; The New Verse News; South Dakota Review; Naugatuck River Review; Lullwater Review; The Kentucky Review; Blue Fifth Review; The Main Street Rag; Clackamas Literary Review; 22 wagons by Danijela Trajković; Istok Akademia, an anthology of contemporary Anglophone poetry; California Quarterly; Poetry International, and Fugue. She has new work due out 2019 in New American Writing, The Kerf, and Sequestrum. Henning taught through California Poets in the Schools, received several CAC grants, and taught poetry workshops through the William James Association’s Prison Arts Program. Henning’s third poetry book, Cathedral of the Hand, was published 2016 by Finishing Line Press.