Gibel Carps, Dog Parks, and Midnight Moons: Miracles of the Sky

By Dian Cunningham Parrotta

Dian Cunningham Parrotta looks skywards for a beguiling mixture of dramatic performance and information while celebrating art and nature from watching those slow-moving puffy cumulus, feathery cumulus, and those low-wide riding blankets of gray stratus clouds along with swirling storm clouds forming impermanent and overpowering countless configurations. Dian brings back the fun of seeing patterns in random clouds and in those mysterious universes found inside of nighttime skies always finding meaningful patterns between unrelated or random into spontaneous connections and newly found miracles. She takes you on magical carpet rides and never lets it land low or stop flying. She first wondered about cloud and night-time sky formations when she attended Stony Brook University, which was only a one-hour trip from her Brooklyn home, and was mesmerized at how many stars could be seen since there were no stars in Brooklyn. Then she traveled as a Peace Corps volunteer and saw the spectacular sky above the Red Sea in the Yemen Arab Republic and had seen phytoplankton for the first time shimmering like fireflies but inside of the sea and splashing up on the shoreline always looking like twinkling stars sitting for a while on Earth. Dian then lived in Sudan and would sit by the Nile River, which inspired creative images to come alive in the clear desert night. This poet finds nature to be a perennial source of her inspiration.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Jun 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9781725270671

Dian Cunningham Parrotta

Since her Brooklyn days, Dian Cunningham Parrotta has lived in various parts of the world, including a trip to revolutionary Iran to visit a college sweetheart, the very handsome Iranian naval officer Shapoor Giahi. She served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Yemen Arab Republic, taught English in the Sudan, and has been teaching for the past thirty years at Fairfax County Public Schools in northern Virginia. Dian’s newest excitement is teaching in the Family Learning Program at a local elementary school’s English for the Literacy Council of Northern Virginia. She dreams of teaching and working with children of military parents who live internationally so she can join up with her two sons, Emile and Emir Parrotta, who live and work in Prague and Madrid, respectively.

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Gibel Carps, Dog Parks,

and Midnight Moons

Miracles of the Sky

Dian Cunningham Parrotta

Gibel Carps, Dog Parks, and Midnight Moons

Miracles of the Sky

Copyright ©

2020

Dian Cunningham Parrotta. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

199

W.

8

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, Eugene, OR

97401

.

Resource Publications

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199

W.

8

th Ave., Suite

3

Eugene, OR

97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-7252-7065-7

hardcover isbn: 978-1-7252-7066-4

ebook isbn: 978-1-7252-7067-1

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

07/21/20

in memory of my two english bullies, jimmy mateo and simon the crusader, whose spirits returned to the blessed sky often showing me themselves in huge floating clouds always still following me around

Table of Contents

Title Page

simon my big hughey baby in diapers always my heart

Funeral Blues

jimmy my brindle bright

prose poetry

a dog park in the sky

ode to the sky’s falling

a sky double dream

against a cloudy winter’s starling sky

i hear a cloud drumming a tatt-tatt tattooing

flashing spirit lights inside my eyes’ sky

a white winter sky

humble puddles capture the great gorgeous sky

see stormy sea

big sky park

rainbow warrior’s cloudy serenade

in the lavapies quarter of madrid

a floating sabot cloud and water dolphins

authentic italian focaccia bread clouds

the sun light’s reflection

ghost-ridden hunchback whale clouds

our