Synkroniciti is excited to welcome poet Kate Potter, residing in Pennsylvania, with two insightful poems. “Straw and mirrors” remembers youthful solitude, filled with daydreaming: “in our real house I stood big mirrors on the floor/ for hours I’d peer in/ examining the room on the other side.” Kate speaks of building an imaginary house and looking out on the world through its windows. Imagination is a hallmark of creativity, but this willingness to explore and create internal and external space with awe and openness is a target for bullying. Others often feel threatened by it and the way it changes the world. Thankfully Kate’s internal life has been rich enough to keep her nourished and alive. The second poem, “I have no answers” is quite different, exploring the harsh reality of the US healthcare system, which milks the sick and the old for money: “how did this one culture come to regard its elders/ as a means to grow rich?/ not with wisdom not with experience/ rich with material wealth.” How can we hope for a better world when we treat life with such contempt? Kate distills her thoughts and emotions into intense short poems, nakedly vulnerable and full of vision and intensity. Both poems deal with how society seeks to mine us for resources and deny our humanity–one of the great tragedies of the human experience.
Read Kate’s powerful poems in Synkroniciti’s “Belonging” issue, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Kate Potter, a hemiplegic septuagenarian poet, is a proud nasty woman and cat lady getting by in a Pennsylvania nursing home. Potter has been reading, studying, writing and reciting poems for over forty years. She conducts a biweekly poetry circle for fellow inmates in her nursing home.
Professionally, Potter flew to Western Europe and the Middle East as a flight attendant and French translator for TWA until a corporate takeover ended her career of nearly thirty years. For most of her adult life Potter has been an activist, promoting all of the arts and advocating for a healthy environment.