What Life Is

By Judith Garrett Segura

Judith Garrett Segura is a writer and visual artist who has dedicated her creative life to what she calls The Great Project, a multidisciplinary effort to treat all things of the mind and the aesthetic senses with perfect seriousness, to be true to ones own responses and thoughts, and to be no one but oneself.

What Life Is, her collection of poetry, is a bold new product. It is the embodiment of more than thirty years of thinking and writing about the nature of the human experience. Autobiographical, both by design and necessity, it specifically explores the nature of her experience in detail.

Poetry has the power to surprise us with knowledge, even understanding, of ourselves. In the expression of the joys and disappointments of a single life, the universality of human experience shines within What Life Is.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Apr 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781480815803

Judith Garrett Segura

Judith Garrett Segura grew up in a small town on the upper Texas coast. After a twenty-four-year career at A. H. Belo Corporation, where she was company historian, curator of the corporate art collection, and president and trustee of The Belo Foundation, she retired to devote herself to her own creative work. She lives in Dallas, Texas.

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Copyright © 2015 Judith Garrett Segura.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-1579-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-1580-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015902855

Archway Publishing rev. date: 4/21/2015

Contents

Preface

i. Joy

Still in Grace

The Coup

What Life Is

The Lies I Tell Myself

God Is Love

Muse the God

Sea of Crete

Graceful Exit

The Best Time

The Poetic View

Daily Life

ii. Family

Eulogy Written in Advance

Advance Planning

Dancing as He Thinks

Home for the Holidays

Home Words

I Know Now

In My Country

Instructions for a Fatherless Child

I Picked You

My Father Tells His Dreams

Unaware

Love Is Your Mother

Someone Dies

On My Father Dying

On My Mother’s Death

You Cooked for Me

iii. Self

Attic Room

My Last Lament

The Perfectly Balanced Life

Fourteen Crows

My Flickering Lamp

Aphrodite’s Tide

Eat Dirt

Fearlessness of Wings

Bone Chill

I Can’t Read

My Weeping Time

The Same Eye

October Lament

Self-Portrait in the Met

Small World

Watcher

Black Crepe

Face Down

My Theory of Everything

The Truth I Tell Myself

Oldest Thought

The Prodigy

The Step

Solstice Gifts

Nine Eleven O One

Happy These Days

Liberty Leading the People

Longing

iv. Other

The New World

Atonement

Mud Pies

Café Tables

Freedom Koan

Witness

From Delfi

Twelfth Night

What Love Is

Inconsolable

Hot Tub—Santa Fe

v. Dreams

Animus

Mamoo’s House

Mother, I Dreamed

Come This Way

Night Flight

The Gesture

vi. Art

Archaic Smile

Brancusi’s Egg

Grateful for Monet

Giotto’s Version

vii. Nature

Nothing Stops

The Named Garden

Migration

Wings for Fins

Evening in the City

Face of Spring

October Song

Readiness

Seasonal Change

Birds: Summer 2007

More Birds: Summer 2011

Backyard Documentary: March 2007

Christmas Dawn

Wings of Bees

Sign of Spring

Laguna Vista, December 16, 2009

For Avelino

Preface

Writing poetry is my examination of life, my effort to better understand those around me, as well as myself. The challenge to distill my tumbling thoughts into the most expressive, yet spare, language requires that I dive deeper into my own thought, not accepting the first and most available