Dian Cunningham Parrotta

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