Growing Music
My flowers sing in the key of “G.”
Fat melons are in “F,”
Which stands for fat, and obviously
They cling to the bass clef.
While in between, green neutral things
Seem stuck on middle Cs;
There, half-note beans climb up to snare
Arpeggios of peas.
Sally Cook is both poet and painter of Magic Realist paintings. Nature and its vagaries are a constant source of inspiration for her. Her poems have appeared in Blue Unicorn, First Things, Chronicles, The Formalist Portal, Light Quarterly, National Review, Pennsylvania Review, Trinacria, and other electronic and print journals. A five-time nominee for a Pushcart award, in 2007 Cook was featured poet in The Raintown Review. She has received several awards from the World Order of Narrative and Formalist Poets, and her Best American Poetry Challenge-winning poem “As the Underworld Turns” was published in Pool. Recently Cook was one of two finalists in the 2013 Aldrich Press Poetry Book Award, judged by Marly Youmans.