Welcome to Poetically Yours. This segment showcases poetry from northern Illinois poets. This week we feature Tracy Noel.
Noel is a native Chicagoan who returned to her Midwest roots after 20 years. She has traveled extensively, with passionate interests in native cultures and ecology.
In 1988, Noel received a Bachelor of Science degree in biology from Northland College in Wisconsin. Since that time, she’s tried her hand at many challenges and occupations. They include tree-planting, cleaning up after the EXXON/Valdez oil spill, sustainable agriculture research, for-profit and subsistence farming in numerous regions, landscaping, catering, teaching, tour guiding, fisheries research and public speaking.
While living in Oregon for 14 years, she directed a small non-profit organization and a Youth Garden Project, educating about and advocating for healthy food production, food equality and preservation of natural resources. Meanwhile, she helped to develop a vibrant movement to support healthy and just local food production for local consumption.
In recent years, she has been a farmer and trainer for a non-profit training program that helps people rebuild their lives through food production. Presently, she teaches horticulture to incarcerated individuals.
A skilled boater, Noel likes to experience new places “from the water.” She gets most excited about sharing good food, spending time with family, hot summers, cold winters, sunshine, and lightning bugs. And she is most proud when people call her a farmer. Today’s poem uses a mystical creature to explain the ups and downs of life. It’s called “Kicked by a Unicorn.”
The bruise is indelible.
Blue ink saturates the left ventricle
Then gets pumped into the guts
Filling the spaces with thick painful permanence
The dark blue ink of dissolved fairy tales
Of melted starry nights
Coloring the view of a world turned sideways
Dumping out all that is known to be true
All the happiness
Everything else clinging for some indication of reality
To be wounded by such a creature
To be affronted by the purest symbol of pure
To have every dream bludgeoned by a glass hoof
It is a mortal wound
There is no medicine to make it heal
No magic to dissolve the pain
No miracle to believe in again
Mortal
Wound
