Meet CRYSTIE COOK of Valley Winds Chapter

Crystie Cook was born in Salt Lake City, Utah and grew up in Sandy, Utah. She has a B.A. in English with a Creative Writing Emphasis and a B.S. in Psychology from the University of Utah and has lived in Puerto Rico, Arizona, California, and New Mexico. She is bilingual in Spanish and enters an average of five to six poetry contests a year. She figures she has written between 900 and 1000 poems and has won 188 awards, with an emphasis on music, birds, and nature, but sometimes she will write on other subjects. She works with caption calls for the hard of hearing, teaches piano part time, and has three funny parakeets who don't write any poems.

Mourning Doves Wait

All summer long, on the treble clef staff
of five utility lines, mourning doves
perch in a tentative melodic line
of thin, quiet notes. They might change position,
up a third, down a third,
wings fluttering like flute keys.
The doves are plain, brown shadows,
faint commas in a mystery novel
sweetened by the last of summer’s peaches.
Slender vines reach with tired fingers
to flick feathers from a long-abandoned bird nest
in the cherry tree.
Mourning doves live with making indecision
delicate and delightful, small heads wondering
over each breeze and long-limbed tree for the taking.
Still, the title “mourning” becomes them,
since no matter how strong the summer,
all sweet songs end with emptiness and silence.