Poet of the Month

Gabriella Miotto

Gabriella Miotto is a first-generation Italian-American, born in California, and blessed with the good fortune to have known both sets of grandparents. Her life as a family physician has focused on community medicine in California and Alaska, as well as humanitarian relief and development work in Latin America and the Balkans with such groups as PROSECO, the UNHCR and Doctors of the World. Her current interests lie in the realm of the imagination and medicine, how body and psyche can partner with each other for healing through imagery, multicultural wellness body practices, dream-tending and poetry. She is the on the staff at the Children's Clinic in Long Beach. Most recently, she has presented on the topic of the use of poetic imagery in medicine at various U.S. and Canadian universities, and at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

Homage to Watts Towers

I hear you shift toward the sun on warm afternoons
and settle back in the chill of evening,
a spiraled labyrinth on a California street.
Do you miss the solitary touch of Sabato Rodia's hands
on your steel core, your mortared antlers,
your mosaicked heart of Malibu tiles and broken glass?
You know, they say you were the muse
that seduced him from alcohol's despair.
And on days when you dance with the wind,
you shed bits of color in his memory.
 

Prayer for Twelfth Night

Call for cardamom,
and with this queen of spices
and milk and honey
steep my heart
that its sound may then
become a murmuration,
one with the songbirds,
moving on and on
into unknown territories,
seasoned and simmered
under winter moon.
Call also for red currants,
and with this berried juice
henna my regrown hands
that they may hold again
whom and what I love.