Fenna Thomas is an emerging NYC poet with a strong background in the arts and creative pursuits. She has been a classical guitarist, a classical guitar teacher, and a singer-songwriter with modest radio airplay. She also is a holistic psychotherapist, intuitive empath, and dream analyst in full-time private practice, having served people in the NYC area for 35 years. Her private practice offers pet therapy, where her therapy cats provide comfort and calm to people in a very busy, besieged, and nervous city.
Fenna enjoys organic urban gardening and has spent time and resources helping urban wildlife, educating people in her community about their needs and ways that people and urban wildlife can peacefully co-exist. Having gone for spiritual direction for 20 years shaped her non-violent ethic, and the zen training she received during those years was invaluable in helping her establish her holistic practice and perspective. She’s a vegetarian, an urban homestead cook, is guided by an independent blend of Quaker and Beguine spirituality, is a highly sensitive person (HSP), is an INFP personality type, and is insatiably creative and curious. She is currently studying poetry privately with American poet Matthew Lippman.
Poems by Fenna Thomas
La Salette
It was the end of the summer in snow-capped, alpine France the cow bell tinkle the only sound in that green and great expanse. Two shepherd children, a herd dog, beheld as if near dreams a grief-stricken woman, although radiant with light, in a dried up, poor ravine. Beautiful lady, betraying a crone whose voice became lance-like that September noon warning the spoilage of walnuts and wheat leaving Corps starving- with nothing to eat. She wept about the cesspool the clergy had become- as well, the foul-mouthed cart drivers swearing on her son, and Maximin, an unschooled child, deprived her tear-stained face, his mother died when he was young- that shield, the Virgin's grace. So Melanie, she bore the brunt, voicing stark prophecies, that chastisements and much tumult would strike the earth and seas, and though the men in robes of black did carefully opine the message was for later and did not believe this child. Maximin died, unhappy, unstable and Melanie died on a boarding house floor. To achieve the remarkable, both were unable yet the mercy of God sailed them to that stormless shore- and the rouge sun rises on the beggar and the thief- on the handsome, on the fortunate on the poor with least relief, and a beauty, hued with sorrow, like meadow bluets small, appears with angst and urgency, her tears, like dewdrops, fall on pastel roses, pastel roses pastel roses of LaSalette pastel roses, pastel roses, pastel roses of LaSalette, A wind exudes fair fragrance yet- like pastel roses of LaSalette.
The Classical Guitarist’s Communion
A woman sets up to practice in a very quiet, sun-drenched place- a small, treeless cemetery fenced low, high on a sprawling, pitched meadow overlooking the steel-blue glaze of the gulf of St. Lawrence. The French Acadians still rake the beaches for Irish Moss with Canadian horses on their part of Prince Edward Island. She moves a few stones and white pebbles from under her foot stool, steadies it, then reaches for her spruce and rosewood Del Pilar classical guitar. It rests for a moment on her lap, as she takes in a cluster of horses grazing freely on the beach a quarter kilometer down, at the edge of the meadow. From the distance they look dark bay. She starts her scales. Into the 6th, the B minor, she sees 5 draft and Canadian horses come galloping up the steep meadow. They flow toward her, flow like the skirt of her peach sundress in a light breeze. They are drawn by the rare notes, rarely heard in their lea. The lady sees that the horses are actually light bay and liver chestnut in color, and have sweet natures, like Morgans. Curious, they line up perfectly, side by side, close on the other side of the fence, and listen. For 5 minutes, they are still, like equine manikins for a drawing class. She runs through Albeniz' Leyenda, her arrangement of Shenandoah in drop D, and the Welsh David Of The White Rock, and still they stand, mesmerized, with spherical-sweet, sepia colored eyes and triangular snoots pointing like cannons. She finishes, takes a break and leans over, careful not to scare the horses with her bobbing head and jutting elbow, searching through her home-made lunch for the blackberries in a Tupperware cup. She tosses some to the horses, but one pelts a nose, maybe the alpha's nose, and they bolt in unison, like rabid bats out of hell, back down the hills interspersed with lowly buttercups and bluets, to the beach, revealing the defensive prey they really are. Kyrie Eleison.