Kirsty Jones
Sycamore buds burst
tight twisted forms unfurling
in timeless rhythm
umbrella crowns – astounding
to think they held themselves so
small
spreading glorious now
to delight in the dancefloor crush
of another sultry summer
before curling
into themselves
to drift, decay
disintegrate
to soil
and root
and when the earth
warms itself once more
the sycamores
sway wildly
limbs outstretched
stronger
for all that came before.
Susan P. Blevins
I am the soil beneath my feet,
ashes to ashes, dust to dust,
seamless merging of human,
vegetable, animal and mineral.
I am the birdsong all around me,
players in an avian symphony,
harmonies reconciling dissonance,
soul-song fresh and new as spring.
I am the woodland canopy
stretched out above my head,
clad in nascent tender green,
offering shelter, beauty, fruit
I am the warm and gentle air
that breathes me into divine harmony
far beyond the will of my creating,
time an abstract concept,
my only certainty, the now
Lisa Romano Licht
Your gold hoop earrings glint
in the sun’s glare, rival
your ebony hair, shiny
seal’s cap coiling
into a long ponytail.
A street-long snake of cars
intersection six lanes wide,
and you waiting
for the light to change.
I drive, inching forward,
stop where you stand.
Cars crawl by
white noise of the city:
No one is listening.
You pose, defiant,
body captive in tight jeans,
young curves suffocating.
A cigarette, your accessory.
With a glint
your knowing eyes
challenge all that pass;
impatient,
you shift your knapsack.
The light changes.
You strut uphill
toward the bus stop, surprisingly
graceful in platform shoes.
Suddenly, mid-street,
you sing.
Your clear, honeyed voice
rings out,
uplifting as a flock of birds gliding
over the sea of cars.
Melodious waves unbalance me,
so unexpected.
Like the stark sunlight, a cappella
so raw and sweet
it hurts.
I surrender, willing prisoner
of your voice,
spiral of joy
rising
until the light must change.
Ivanka Fear
The audacity of it, really,
hubris of poets, actually,
thinking song lyrics aren’t poetry.
Poem
Intense emotional outpouring
Beauty of images
Rhythm of language
Art of expression
Enduring
The story of life
open to interpretation.
Song?
Ditto
Plus…
The haunting sound
of repetitive refrains
spinning round and round
our heads, pulling us in,
song and listener becoming one.
Fused with
explosive sound,
not resounding silence.
If I can dream…
Music and lyrics
Beethoven’s 5th,
Jackson’s Thriller,
symphony.
The sound of silence…
Imagine Lennon,
Mozart’s unfinished
requiem.
The day the music died…
Vivaldi’s Four Seasons,
Elton’s Candle
in the wind.
Blowin’ in the wind…
Handel’s Messiah,
Zeppelin’s Stairway,
to heaven.
Hallelujah…
Brahm’s Lullaby,
I will always
love you.
Where do I begin?
Killing me softly…
Lyricists and musicians,
I bow down to you
mere poet that I am.
The power of words is great;
the power of song is
overwhelming.
Marianne Brems
Bluebirds feed at a birdfeeder,
heads jerking about between bites.
A struggling cyclist sits tall
after a climb up the hill.
A man unhurriedly walks his dog
as if without losses or appointments.
Dandelions soften edges of cracks
on the sidewalk.
A child walks through a puddle,
stamping her feet in the middle.
Cars travel by at neighborly speeds
without hiss or roar or vexing exhaust.
Harmonic minor scales trickle lightly
from the house next door.
A hopscotch grid in uneven yellow chalk
occupies a driveway, waiting for small feet.
Two squirrels chase each other with fluid dexterity
on a tree trunk.
The broken glass bottle in the street yesterday
is gone.
Branches of trees bend toward
the middle of the street like an archway.
For the moment, the rest doesn’t matter.
Donna J. Gelagotis Lee
First, the farmer selling vegetables
in baskets strung astride his mule
wakes me as the morning sun releases
dew and the sweet aroma of thyme
begins to dissipate. Then the women
who pass outside the house chat
as they return from the baker
with warm loaves of horiátiko psomí
or from the milkmaid with eggs and
news, their voices rising from the street.
I can smell the sea air warming. I can feel it
laced with salt. I can feel the rhythm of a country
underfoot. I can almost hear the lyre on the wind.
Every step becomes a note in the string
of words I mouth imperfectly
as I begin my trek into the village,
where women keep shop near the platía
and we exchange our greetings
as I collect bottles of water, Greek
crackers in plastic wrap, toilet tissue,
the news in English, just ferried in,
along with the tourists, from Athens.
All the way back, I glance into
the limewashed open-doored
tourist shops selling T-shirts, film,
strappy cotton dresses, and re-
productions, on vases, of an ancient life.
ESH Leighton
My father thinks his voice has gotten tinny with age
that it has thinned and thinned like
some other fathers’ hairlines
I don’t see him much anymore
and when I do, I notice that his body is a different shape,
the hair at his temple gone completely white,
and the skin beneath less freckled and ruddier and ruddier by the year
But his voice,
his voice is stronger than it was when I was a child
When I was so young I could count my years on my fingers,
my favorite book was about the Gingerbread Man
and his hubris and his downfall
I remember my father reading it over and over,
quieter and quieter
as I learned the verse by heart
until I could recite it to myself
until his voice wasn’t there at all
just my own lungs my own larynx my own cadence
Today my father sent me a message of his voice
speaking about the monsoons in Arizona
when here in Las Vegas
we’ve gone two hundred days without rain
He sounded like a great orator
like a man of the stage
like the person you’d want to read you a good book
There were stories in his throat
ones I have never heard
and his voice was cool and concentrated
just like the rain in this desert that never seems to come
Kat Terban
The days keep serving up overcast skies but the air
is always dry and the plants are shriveling up with thirst;
yet the birds still sing, the fisher humps across the yard,
and the mornings, plangent with dew, conquers dread night.
Purple tipped fingers sifting through shells where blue
dunes hold the full tide’s wrack so wool dipped willful
in swift dye sought across ages, wrought by snails
soft from the sea. The past returns within us to live,
to turn to itself again, day upon day. It reaches through
our skin, our bones, to knell, to echo across tongues
at fireside. Fevered brows seek to be remembered when
embraced by cold shrouds. What has soft lips and a hide
that enjoys a feather-stiff curry brush? In the night, we
imagine our fingertips extending like quicks grown
beneath nails left long uncut, touching the window
as the first frost radiates out across one pane while laying
warm under another. Fresh fallen death crunching beneath
our boots: birch, maple, oak, hemlock, and walnut. Ferns
shifting from green to gold on the corner of River View
and Merrow. Water cools. Bubbles pop. The bottom
of the cup never has answers. It is empty. It is devoid,
burning away certitude. It is filled again with the lies
about how things couldn’t get any worse, where hope is flanked
by fear. Closed eyes linger on dusk’d lids and bring no safety.
Clouds crack and stars spill out along the edges. Long gusts,
uneasy wind breaks the peace between leaf and branch. A deer
steps into the flurried fall to lay athwart a gap at the base of two
young oaks. Birds eat the bones of bread, the entrails of yesterday’s
croissant, the burnt offerings of panko that’s dropped from fingers
baking. Clever beaks pecking at the crusts cut away and abandoned
by mothers. Spread wings swift in swooping down to pluck up
and devour the whipped stiff and custard smooth embryos of friends
and enemies alike. The unborn children of flowers are ground down
to paste inside gizzards during the short days of winter. The lumpy
oatmeal of the sky that started shearing off into flakes and drifting
toward the ground. We open our mouths and taste breakfast.
All of the wrong reasons were remembered, were recorded
as a stained outline on the concrete, found when the snow
banks melted the next spring. Deep loam held in the hand,
warmed, bedding for mammoth, gray-striped sunflowers
overhead, nodding in a light breeze. Three painted turtles,
faces raised, aligned on a log set and centered in an intermittent
pond surrounded by tufts of scarlet miniclover. Today, the sun
refused to set. It drunkenly stumbled across its zenith
then paused at the threshold where night sleeps before
tiptoeing the entire way ’round the horizon, drinking up
the bright blue of the sky. Mountains crumble into grit,
stars fall into singularities, and oceans expand as the dead
fill up what’s not bottomless. Rivers walk back upon
themselves, rejuvenating oxbows, eating the foundations
of the world. The universe breaths in the space between
atoms, gravity bends time, and everything becomes new born.
Samantha DeFlitch
Across from St. Bede’s. Here
a young man with
his holding gloves and an owl
outside the window
of an old woman watching
her soaps. Her sill:
rosary beads, two blood
pressure cuffs
and photo frames that push
time through
her drawn-out years. She was
once a train
station. Found sensible love
in the old country.
Spoke Polish in reverse. Back
further, war and war.
Fish egg. Magpie shot and book
of heaven and war.
Childbirth. And a girl whirling
to a balalaika,
ritual against ghost-drawing
winter dusk.
Cold snap. Babushkas like
nesting dolls,
opening their bodies to more
little babushkas,
brought forth already full of
prophecy and slouching.
The years of sloping
blue and pine,
bread, chipping at ice with a
blunt blade.
All at once, language loses
meaning; a flame
casts long shadows on a cabin
wall as the dogs
creep closer and begin.
Look! The young
man taps the window,
gestures until our
old woman threads out a smile.
Then the owl
turns its white head
and becomes.
