Debra Harmes Kurth

CONTACT:
Email: earthsisterdeb@hotmail.com

BIO:
Let's see, Debra is either an old hippie or a forever gypsy, depending on how you look at the world. She loves to garden and read almost anything. She has three dogs Brutus, Magick, and Porkchop (the troublemaker). They keep her busy mentally and physically. She also draws, paints, and makes stone jewelry. She recently moved from her long-time home in West Virginia, which she misses horribly, to Wisconsin. She was raised in Wisconsin but has lived and traveled from east coast to west coast.

Her first published poem was when she was in high school, and she has written ever since. She wrote a weekly column for the Cabell Record and Putnam Democrat on poetry from 2004 until 2007, when the paper changed hands. Then again for another year and a half from 2012 through 2013, every other week until the paper stopped publishing.

She published and edited a poetry quarterly Art With Words for three years 2005, 2006, and the final issue was published in the last quarter of 2007. The cost of publishing, mailing costs and life change issues made it impractical to continue. In 2006 Barbary Chaapel and her put out a chapbook entitled A Place of Amazing Grace for the families of the Sago Mine disaster in West Virginia. All proceeds of this chapbook went directly to the Miners Assistance Fund set up by the Council of Churches. Copies were also sent to the West Virginia Cultural Center where they were made available for sale. She is pleased to say that they did very well with this venture.

She has also been published in publications Coal: A Poetry Anthology, published by Marshall University, Mobius several times, Porter Gulch Review, Spring 2007, and she was the featured poet in elizaPress Publications’ Digging, Eclectic Anthology #3, and numerous smaller publications—more than she can list. She was an officer in the West Virginia Poetry Society for several years and the winner of numerous contests both statewide and nationally within the National Poetry Society.

Poetry

Strolling Down Main Street

After twenty-five years of living down South
I’ve moved back, back to the Northern Mid-West. 
A cold German place, this tiny village 
of three hundred where I grew up.
Where I ran from some fifty years ago.

Main Street was once a tunnel of trees. 
Dark and cool all summer long, with
sidewalks that never burned your feet. 
A fantasy world that fed my imagination,
some days a magical kingdom 
and in evenings a haunted forest. 
Now that street is naked, unadorned,
stark, in the absence of trees.

The old home-place is up on the left. 
A leviathan of a house, once sand-shingled 
in hues of green now stands embarrassed 
in boring taupe aluminum, such a sad color.
The three seasons porch of only windows 
is now a four seasons room of two windows.
How will they see who is walking to
and staggering from Hart’s Tavern?
Maybe there is no one left to care.

I stand there sad and wonder 
if these strangers who live in my old house
removed the summer kitchen once hidden 
beneath an ancient maple. 
Why the garden plot is weedy. 
Why the lilac grove is lawn. 
And why, oh why they wrapped
my childhood memories
in ugly taupe aluminum?

I don’t think I will walk this way again.

As a Poetess I Ask

“That he wouldn’t approve of me was
something I couldn’t bear.”
—Anne Sexton, Therapy tape, 5/17/62

How far have we come from Anne,
in paper-doll dresses pastel
bound tight, in an up-hill fight
she stood tall, stumbled, and fell.

Who was she, that horseless rider,
dressed by black sack to lace, pen in hand
a race beyond controlled pace,
small hollowed winged bird in some man’s land.

Embodied as child, girl to woman,
one who spoke from a silent place
unheard of call, unknown to all,
alone by design, alone in the chase.

She was a river unsettled,
high or low at constant run
to assimilate, then consummate
mother’s matrimonial bed of fun.

With her tiny lettered fingers
she wrote the world crystal clear,
from poke-a-dot lie, thunderous sky,
run-away-train engineers couldn’t steer.

She went to war with threads of self
with her words were battles fought
for a complex mind that sanity find
pre-finished fabric, patterned thought.

So many came before us,
born from schools of old
each a voice unbound; they broke new ground.
Remember them and be as bold.

Anne, Sara, Virginia, Sylvia,
dove straight into that stormy sea;
writers without a raft, masters of our craft,
that seriously taken women would be.