Synkroniciti is excited to welcome back poet Maureen Tolman Flannery, winner of the poetry competition in our previous issue, Expectations. For Dignity, she offers two remarkable poems: a whimsical imagining of the secret lives of flowers and a tribute to the enduring strength and dignity of Mayan women.
“Royal Flowers Conduct a Morning Chat Regarding Their Affections” unfolds as a botanical romance worthy of Jane Austen, the noble Lady Slipper falling for a Bachelor Button.
“I ‘m concerned about Milady Slipper, so all in a tither/ since blue button flowers have blossomed hither./ Proud Lady Slipper had vowed on the Big Dipper/ she’d never be courted beneath her station./ What, cried Purple Aster, (though no one had asked her)/ shall become of her reputation?/ She’s windswept, swaying, as you can see./ having fallen for a bachelor of low degree.”
Maureen captures pure natural magic, joy shimmering through rhyme and rhythm. Human royalty was never so delightful, nor so full of artful play.
“Maya Women of Dignity” takes us to a different tradition of nobility, that of the Mayan moon goddess Ixchel, crowned with a venomous, cunning serpent.
“Today women wear the tzute,/ a snake of coiled cloth/ to head-balance baskets of produce/ free their hands for further work/ and remind their spines/ of the upright posture/ that is their birthright.”
Through vivid imagery and cultural memory, Maureen demonstrates that women’s power and dignity are never truly lost. They endure beneath the surface, adapting, surviving, and waiting to flower again when given space and light.
The contrast between hard-won endurance and flowery play makes these poems all the more satisfying together.
Experience Maureen’s transcendent work in Synkroniciti’s Dignity, Vol. 8, No. 3, available for $7 here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Maureen Tolman Flannery is a Chicago poet raised in a Wyoming sheep-ranching family. She and Dan, her actor husband of fifty-seven years, have recently returned to Wyoming to rescue and restore three historic log cabins.
More than five hundred of her poems have been published in anthologies and literary reviews, among them: North American Review, Xavier Review, Winning Writers, BorderSenses, Wisconsin Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, Calyx, Pedestal, and Atlanta Review.
Her latest book of poetry is Already Part of the Sky. Other volumes include Tunnel Into Morning, Destiny Whispers to the Beloved, and Snow and Roses about the White Rose resistance in Nazi Germany. She is currently adapting the Snow and Roses poems into a full-length theatre production.