Loretta Libby Atkins, Untitled Encaustic Print
Encaustic monoprint
This print is the cover image for the chapbook She Who Walks the Earth, a collaboration between Kathryn Hunt and Loretta Libby Atkins.
I know the wound, like a tree, is alive,
its roots reaching down. The acanthus I planted
in fall and forgot and forgot, now risen. Time
calibrating itself to go wild over the earth.
The way I once lifted a newborn to my face,
breathed that humusy smell, the lush incredulity
of her wide-eyed arrival. One day I may come to
feel once again what it means to give everything
away. All that’s asked of me — so little, really.
There is no door. Hellebores and camellias in bloom
all through winter. The mind settling like white fluff
from poplars of St. Petersburg, the Neva winding its way
through, letting go in the Baltic. That’s how I
got here, once a newborn myself. The ground this
morning is mitered with purple crocus,
petals as diplomatic as a moth. There is wonder
in my blood, the home I make of it. A home
I can’t keep. That’s how the world is made.
—Kathryn Hunt
Kathryn Hunt (Website) is a poet and writer and makes her home in Port Townsend, Washington, on the coast of the Salish Sea. She is author of two poetry collections, Long Way Through Ruin and Seed Wheel, and two chapbooks, The Country I Come From and She Who Walks the Earth. Her poems have appeared in the Orion, Radar, Poetry Northwest, Narrative, and Carolina Quarterly Review. She’s translated the work Catalan poet Maria-Mercè Marçal and is the recipient of residencies and awards from Ucross, Willapa Bay AIR, Hedgebrook, and Joya AIR (Spain). She was a filmmaker in an earlier lifetime; her first film No Place Like Home premiered at the Venice Film Festival. She’s recently completed a memoir, Last Chance Motel, a mother-daughter tale. She is the instigator and curator of Poetry on the Salish Sea, a poetry series that brings poets from around the Pacific NW and beyond to the Olympic Peninsula.
As a young person, Loretta Libby Atkins grew up fly fishing on the North St Vrain River in Colorado. Trout were some of her best teachers. They were patient and thorough. Their preferences were learned, ie., what fly and how and where to present it on the free stone creek. Their colors were breathtaking when pulled from the water. Encaustic is beeswax and pigment applied on a hot surface. Encaustic color does not fade and reminds her of those magical moments on the North St. Vrain River.