Days 1-14
"30 POEMS IN 30 DAYS" DAILY POETRY BLOG FOR SEPTEMBER, 2020: A FUNDRAISER FOR THE ITHACA SANCTUARY ALLIANCE LAUNCHED BY TIKKUN V'OR (THE ITHACA REFORM TEMPLE)
https://www.gofundme.com/f/30-poems-in-30-days-for-ithaca-sanctuary-alliance
(IF you have discretionary income, please feel invited to contribute at the site above; in any case, please enjoy the poems of today and every previous day of September.)
SEPT 14
It's Simple Susan Eschbach
I send my Black sons
into the world
with so much love
it should be that simple
weapon publicly murdering
driven deluded in his unformed pre-frontal lobe
fundraisers' fervor fuels value-added to his hate
an officer knocks an old man
head to concrete
shoots seven bullets
into a Black back
kills daughters sons small children
without watching,, and no compunction?
I send my Black sons
into the world
with so much love
it should be that simple
Ventilator FRAN MARKOVER
In the small country hospital, my mother
breathes with the only ventilator.
I had promised no extraordinary measures.
With no doctors on call weekends and the
nurse unable to sign, the respiratory therapist
tells me, “You know if we remove the mask,
your mother will die.“ I want to shout yes,
that’s the point. I listen to sucking sounds,
unearthly rhythm, watch oxygen levels
drop whenever mother pulls at the device
abrading her nose. She points to the mask
with her arthritic middle finger. Points to
me, good daughter, little girl never wanting
to leave her without answers, some breath
of fresh air, to not leave her with a vacuum.
VISITING THE WIND Susan Weitz
The wind woke me up
in the middle of a dream.
I followed it into
the tops of the trees
where we howled and danced,
chased owls and bats,
and batted the clouds.
All my possessions,
my schedules, my walls,
lost their significance.
I had forgotten
how to be young,
how to play till you’re tired
and sleep till you’re not.
Who knows where we’re going?
When you next hear the wind,
listen for my voice.
AT THE BOTTOM OF THE HILL . . . Daphne Sola
There used to be a flower garden, perhaps one too many on this multi-gardened property. But in time, energy diminishes, so now the grassy slope simply runs off into the weeds, . . . Which has a pejorative sound, not really deserved, since the asters and Joe pyeweed stand proud, and flying above their heads are the brash and rampant goldenrods.
Books at hand, I find the generic name for goldenrod is soldago, and I love the way, just by the sound, it calls up the indomitable spirit of those plumed yellow heads.
I also learned that these autumn blooming wildflowers prrovide much-needed carbohydrates to the creatures who visit them.
I take comfort in knowing that, having lost my delphinium and roses, I am providing nourishment for butterflies, birds and small animals stocking up for a long flight or for a cold and barren winter.
Needless to say, i no longer refer to the garden at the bottom of the hill, as abandoned.
Patterns Carol Whitlow
Last night at the Ceilidh
We whirled in patterns of do-si-do and Petronella
(no clapping said Katie, though it helps some remember their place)
And that new one, what fun, the Bokay, whirling
in groups of 3 and 4 counterclockwise around one another
And back to our place
Caught in the moment of pure whimsy and not knowing where we were
But knowing we would end up
Where we need to be
Home
To welcome a new person to visit
And whirl.
Oh I miss my old waltz partner who led so well.
Why did I miss the lead of a new move and he had to chastise me
But I can waltz I wanted to tell him
With Dick I can waltz step around the floor and fancy turns
Hands lifted like a garden arbor
Was he forgiving or was he thinking
‘I missed a good waltz with a good partner I made the wrong choice’
And will he ever waltz with me again?
Is there more to life than waltzing
Or waltzing correctly
Or waltzing fancily
Sometimes it seems not
No matter how my skirt flares like flower petals when I am turned.
We were a living garden, a garden of dancers, with
A birdsong of flute, fiddle and keyboard
And Ted on his bodrhan, a heartbeat
O to live and dance in a garden
To be one of the living colors
To create these patterns
And let go
To let go
And just be
What a delight it was
The Ceilidh.
Sin título Santiago Rodriguez
Y esta fantasía del final de los tiempos, de que el mundo se está acabando casi desde que empezó... ¿por qué ahora sí es verdad?
¿Y cuántas veces se nos habrá acabado el mundo?
Y ahora que se acabe el mundo, ¿qué es lo que va a empezar?
Un mundo nuevo no suena mal.
Holmes’ Nautilus
by Martin Bidney
the fives and threes keep growing to a final six
“Build thou more stately chambers, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Let each new mansion, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outworn shell by life’s unresting sea.”
I wrote that down from memory, just now.
Resounding, ’twould allow
My joy in swift renewal to return –
Inquiring, too, what teaching new I’d learn
Rethinking childhood lore:
How wonderful the rushing! splash! and Ocean roar!
A big and troubling thought arrived at last:
What good’s a mansion vast
If it from heaven still would “shut” you “out”?
The stellar Endless how to scan, O Scout,
While at a roof you gaze –
A horizontal wall precluding numen-rays?
Why raise a jail that cannot set you free
To hail Eternity?
A ceiling’s never nobler than the sky
Where we our coessential Being high
May readily descry
And view the Supraluminous, the primal why.
BEDTIME PRAYER Joanna Green
Oh sweet Morpheus
Beloved teach me your
Magical language
Dive me into dark waters
Another world each night
Swirl me down deeper
Shape shifting until
I am the vast hollowness
Of an empty train station
Traveling among the stars and
Crying their tears
Understand? Rob Scott
You dream with your eyes closed.
When your eyes are opened,
you understand.
McCoy Tyner DAVID REGENSPAN
It almost beats you up
The left hand
Of McCoy Tyner,
Pounding and thrusting its fourths
While the right hand flits and flies
Jumping across octaves
Like a deer prancing in a field of thorns.
He is dead now. I saw him
When I was a high school boy
Playing in our band room, making the grand
Piano sway on its wheels. I did not know
Then who he was, that he played A Love Supreme
With Coltrane and Jones and Garrison, I only knew
That he carried me, and I needed to be carried,
In a flood stronger than rivers,
Deeper than grief.
Live! his music said from within my veins. Take
Your fear and tuck it under your arm.
Walk.
Ode to Allen Ginsburg Barbara Regenspan
Oh, Allen Ginsburg, you lucky dog—it had not all fallen apart yet—
militarization, materialism, with martial law creeping in
all still mutable; for your times, you might have exaggerated.
A mother’s mental illness fed your art; your own mind was toolable—
crazy when a prison sentence loomed—saner than all surrounds in
that quest to pull poetry out of romance enough to stir in politics.
I’m jealous; your father drowned in Emily Dickinson—a kind of floating depth
kept you conscious of the nurture in the air, too easily deflated by the solids
you abhorred, protected by a positive force—the Beats.
Jealous too, of that belonging—without a bullying internet to enhance
the smears, while your brilliance kept you this side of sane—able
to find the avocado in human flesh and vice versa,
when rent in Greenwich village was cheap; your dump had cachet—especially
for us who live with all you feared materialized—locking us into artless sanity.
SEPT 13 Note from your blogger: This week, and for Reform Jews, last night, Selichot,* (meaning forgiveness, or more literally “to say sorry”) ushered in the Jewish High Holiday season featuring Rosh Hashanah (New Year’s) then the ten days of repentance when we seek forgiveness directly from the people we have hurt, and then Yom Kippur, (the day of repentance/atonement) when we ask forgiveness directly of God. This blog will not be refreshed with new poems on Saturday, September 19 nor Monday, September 28 in honor of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
13 Fine Times with Riley, Poe, and You
by Martin Bidney
bouncy trochaic eights
/x /x /x /x /x /x /x /
“When the frost is on the pumpkin and the fodder’s in the shock”
I with memory enlivened like to take a mental walk.
I’m a ten-year-old. October, Mrs. Wildrick had proclaimed,
Would in Hoosierland (hooray!) be “Month of Whitcomb Riley” named.
“Once upon a midnight dreary, as I pondered weak and” worn,
Came the long-familiar amble of a guy who tried to mourn,
Yet despite the saddened gabble of the nevermore-y moan,
I could hear the jaunty jangle of the thought, “I’m not alone!”
“Now come along boys and listen to my tale,
And I’ll tellya ’bout my troubles on the Old Chisholm Trail…”
If you’re ever in decline, and a panacea seek,
Write a line of jokey trochee. You’ll be fine in a week!
[Optional Coda
“Come a ti yi yippy yippy yay, yippy yay,
Come a ti yi yippy yippy yay.”]
PORTENT Joanna Green
in the cracks between dreams
you can see the shape of
something
that lies in wait
the goldenrod reigns
magnificent
until the sun passes behind cloud
and you can hear the whisperings
of dread
what is this
why
do you come for me
on this fine morning?
NIGHT Susan Weitz
The stars returned to the sky tonight
following a vacation in the clouds.
A choir of insects welcomed them;
moths flexed to catch their sparks.
It looked to me like a million cars
had hit the highway,
and there was Mars, low on the horizon,
directing traffic.
It must be hard on the stars,
night after night,
hearing what we call each other,
watching our souls extinguish.
It’s painful, too, at the altitude
of the grass, the height of a horse
or human.
May we furlough with you,
the flakes of heaven?
Our home, this Ouroboros,
has swallowed its own light.
Awe Fran Markover
Nights, I’d watch Uncle Julius. How he’d bob up and down, hum, flail his arms, mumble in an
undecipherable language. Julius with his long white beard, few teeth, faded black yarmulke.
He lived in the attic like the loneliest poet, looking out the window at stars, shadowy cornfields,
chicken coops. To my four year old self, this must be god, scary, ancient, unknowable.
God a singer who wailed strange lyrics up past ceilings. When I listened carefully, I could
discern some of them: Sh’ma, Y’Israel, Adonai. Sometimes, Julius would jump from his seat
and I’d take cover behind the biggest chair. God was a dancer, too, a dancer who wore a white
cloth with fringes like a curtain around his shoulders. As if loss and suffering, brothers and
sisters could be hidden and protected behind that worn shawl. A god included at the dining room
table, one who ate sardines and honey cake. And this is how I came to learn the unknowable,
from this dark old man, robed in moonlight. Something in him, in us, that nods yes, something
larger than old age and senility, than hushed stories of villages on fire, or lost babies. That if we
looked out from our narrow rooms, or peeked into everyday kitchens, if we were quiet as angels,
we might witness our elders, the people around our circle, close their tired eyes, seeing
something, conjuring something from a great, great distance.
It is coming Susan Eschbach
up on midnight
selichot* stars brilliant
in tonight’s darkness
no clouds blur
our vision could be clear
can I let it?
can I breathe deep enough
reflect enough
find stillness within
or beyond
to rethink
re imagine
revisit and renew
my beliefs in spirit
my obligations to community
diving into that word, what even is it
who of us do we name
what do I mean by all who did I forget or despise
my stewardship of ferns, sparrows, beetles
my participation in making life matter
in protecting joy
in embracing laughter
in growing strong minds
this poem a prayer
a moment of be not do
so hard to just be
Canzone in Blue, Then Bluer Vievee Francis on behalf of Carol Whitlow
There wasn’t music as much as there was
terror so the music became as much a
part of the terror as the terror it-
self the swell of the arpeggio building
and breaking, building and breaking, upon the
shores of you. Your shores washed slowly away but
not slowly enough, you feel it, every grain
of sand a note going under, bluing the
body, granular and wet. This has happened
before. You were not special. You belonged to
no group of any more particular concern
than another. But the music has become
you. The hurt coming out, from your open mouth, could
open a grave. Let every done-wrong hain’t throw
its head back and groan. Not done-wrong as in some-
body loved left, somebody is always left,
but someone who deserved to live as much as
anyone else who died by another’s hands
or neglect or the indifference of someone
who cared less or just not about you. And you sang
like you cried until the music of leaving,
of long-gone became you. Does it matter how
many strings? It only takes one to make this
music. But let’s say it was the sound of
a choir that accompanied the run of
blood down a leg. Let’s say a violin sped
its notes down the side of a neck, a tirade
of pricks. Or a high C from a voice thrown sharp
as the pieces of skull a bullet through the
head would leave. Or the river, the river rush-
ing cold and rock-bottomed, with its own furious
song carries you with it, sings you right over
the falls. That is when terror is not blue but bluer,
blue, as capillaries bursting from an eye,
blue as the vein under this razor, blue as
the skin beat so far it breaks into song, a
song like this. I’ve sung this so many times dear
my voice has almost given way, and I’m so scared.
Copyright © 2018 by Vievee Francis, from Asheville Poetry Review
Granite DAVID REGENSPAN
In a house in a room
In a bowl on the floor,
The rocks worn round and smooth.
I hold one in my hand,
This token of the sea’s long fingers
rubbing, caressing.
I think of Maine,
Its seasons heavy
With snows, with red leaves, with phlox and lupines.
My warm flesh against cool stone,
For I moment I am
Sea and granite, flower and flesh.
And then I am gone
And then I am back.
I return the rock,
Breathe long and deep, lack
Nothing, lack everything.
How Will We Celebrate the Birthday of the World (this year)? Barbara Regenspan
At the Slichot service* last night, the subject was the broken tablets, and whether they made it to the ark. I tried to get Mel Brooks and the “oops” out of my mind, “The History of the World Part One’s” comic respite we needed when only mean-ness trickled down from Reagan’s reign.
In our breakout room a young couple with two small children re-met one another for the first time all day, so the tablets really entered as a clean slate, and I slowed forward movement by confusing Mel Brooks with Monty Python, misremembering “The Life of Brian.”
The question, I guess, is how much of the mind’s old garble we bring to each new iteration of self and how much of the old is transmutable. I inserted in the chat my own poetic wisdom, cribbed from Freud, that has never gotten the attention it deserved, I complained in a previous
poem: “Everything is built on the rubble of ancient cities,” but my timing was off and the service moved on. (Ancient Rome is model for the mind, Freud claimed, repeatedly rebuilt on the rubble from the last fire, barbarian invasion, earthquake.)
Translation for us: How many times and how successfully have you rebuilt your mind after your own personal fire, barbarian invasion, or earthquake? And are you ready to give it another try during this High Holiday season and the new year it ushers in?
Judging by my own performance, ancient instances of personal obliteration, real or imagined, have taken shape as monuments in my mind; matter cannot be created or destroyed, so their rubble returns as old made new, like in the detergent commercials of my childhood.
The confederate monuments are coming down, and what will get made of the rubble in the mind and the park, and what new construction will we add or not?
At a seminar awhile back my Protestant colleagues agreed with Peter Gay that Freud did not need to be Jewish, and I had a great hysterical laugh. They thought I had lost my mind.
SEPT 12
Grandchild David Regenspan
It started with doubt
Strolling among the fluted pillars
Of hope’s little temple, muted
fears and fantasies
Of a life joined to another.
I like her, he said.
I asked her name.
Don’t jinx it, he exclaimed,
I just met her at a party;
I hardly
Know her. It took weeks
Before the name of the beloved
Was uttered, months more
Before the flag was planted,
The territory shored up,
The name of ‘couple’ moored
To a suddenly supple land.
He moved in with her, and
It continued with doubt: should two
Become three? Baby--
That was the word that was at last uttered,
First muttered under the breath,
On a stroll in hope’s little temple.
Then allowed its breadth
It grew to possibility. Then there was the trying.
Then the news flying
Like a startled bird: pregnant. Owning
The hope, the body growing, the thought: no longer two.
Then the message arrives: the head is crowning.
Then you.
WANTS AND WAVING GRASSES DAPHNE SOLA
In the early morning
we wanted a pond
and wished away the marshy ground
where water wanting to flow
was trapped into stillness
by rampant grasses and broad-leaved weeds
that themselves wished to be a dream
of thin foliage and pendant flowers.
Soon the morning mist began to rise
and our wish became so strong
we welcomed a bulldozer
and the man in a peaked hat
who shoveled his way through the green
and tangled mass
and spread over high flat banks
the mangled grass
to fade and die.
In the heat of day,
the pond we wanted came into being
as though it had always wished
to be there
the stirred mud sank
and the water was so clear
I could see my hand
submerged in it.
But the day grows long
we have what we wanted
and as evening shadows lengthen
across depths and shallows
I want to slow their descent.
The pond, once so transparent,
is showing its age.
There is no way to wish away the silt
that creeps steadily down
a farm-cropped hill
or the islands of new grass that rise
like continents in the wished-for pond.
It’s been a day-long struggle to
keep relentless change at bay
but struggle has its own rewards
and, in the end,
we would not want it
any other way.
She throws a lifeline
A lure of fascinating ideas, inspiration
How can I help but pause
From my obsessions
And allow my own thoughts to
Wander off
What if? And I could . . .
And How about …
I have forgotten the thrill of my
Precarious position on the cliff over
The void at the edge
Of overwhelm
I have found a path back into the land of the living
And so many destinations to map out I haven’t the time to dwell on
Failures.
THE ROAD Susan Weitz
Nunatsiavut means ‘Our Beautiful Land’
in the ancient Inuktitut language
that we never got to hear
because the road
ended.
Halfway up the coast of Labrador,
35 degrees in July,
ice floes in the cobalt water,
polar bears only recently migrated
for the summer.
Ten years later the road would start
to inch its way northward
from the red sand.
For now, the ‘highway ends here’ sign
and a guidebook describing
the nine-day roundtrip mail-boat ride
to Nain, the Inuit,
or Labradormiut,
village.
We hadn’t budgeted
that kind of time,
had to turn back.
It haunts us, this thing
we didn’t do,
even though we declined
an offer of seal-flipper pie
back in Newfoundland.
In Montreal, on our way home,
we bought a walrus,
soapstone, with ivory tusks,
made in the village
we never got to see
because the road
ended.
(Blog-poster’s note: Maybe it’s unfair to assume that many of us lack background in 19th century romantic poetry, but it helps to appreciate the elegant craft of Martin’s poem to read the poem, “To a Water Fowl” by William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51861/to-a-waterfowl)
Bryant’s Waterfowl
by Martin Bidney
a sandwiching of threes and fives
He who from zone to zone
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight
On the long way that I must tread alone
Will lead my steps aright.
Quite otherwise I chant:
“You are unknown – unknown your shaper, too.
Imaginings upon a throne I view
As poet-hierophant.
Self-changing center I
Horizon my circumference might call,
Which every moment alters. After all,
’Tis wider than the sky.
Sin Título V Santiago Rodriguez
A mí me encanta decir "que Dios te bendiga" y "quiera Dios", aunque no crea en él.
Porque no importa.
¿Qué importa si creo en él o no?
¿Cuánto podría importarle a Dios?
Si un mortal cree en el o no, a Dios le da igual, creo yo.
Pero decirlo igual nos da la oportunidad de hacer sentir mejor a los que creen en Dios.
Bendito sea Dios pues, y ojalá y exista.
Y ojalá que no.
Porque si hizo este mundo, ¿Qué clase de Dios sería?
Uno muy cabron, en mi opinión.
Que Dios nos salve de Dios.
From the Fountain of Praise Fran Markover
and Its Temple of Privilege
I held a toy gun, played cops and robbers
I climbed up a dark stairwell
I explored the construction site, touched the unfinished
I bird-watched in the public park
I jaywalked
I shoplifted $10 worth of lipstick with a friend, 5th grade
I dimmed my headlights
I put a pill bottle into my pocket
I sat on the passenger side
I strolled home holding a bag of chips and a cold drink
I jogged
I napped in the parking lot
I slept on my couch, breathing
*The Fountain of Praise in Houston was the church of George Floyd’s funeral
In the evening Susan Eschbach
in the evening house
devices now powered down
distressors at bay
haiku may be the
only way to stop the noise
everyone be still
complex syllables
broken finally to calm
I breathe silent prayer
Whatever it takes Joanna Green
Cigarettes ambien booze or benzos
Maybe just a beer each night
To each her own
Or watching working sleeping
Whatever it takes
Or takes you
Where you need to go
Some place else
Not here
Not now
Hell no
Within the air’s reach Barbara Regenspan
My David writes about the baby to the baby
tracking a trajectory of moves toward
conception and beyond where everything
starts “within the air’s reach,” a phrase
I borrowed from a September 11 poem
of yesterday on a more exalted blog
where the reference was not the reach
for air happening in you and me as I write
and you read, but rather the reaching
before the contact with pavement of
bodies flying in the sky to avoid a more felt
end of breath.
In these days of existential dread, the work
of living includes the capacity to keep the baby
and the pavement in the separate worlds
needed to protect sanity where the baby
requires a normalcy that must be reconceived
despite our doubts that the air’s reach
has enough of the pure energy of matter unrealized
and hopeful in its lack of expression as something
that took the fundamentals on a wrong trajectory.
Is There an After-Life? Rob Scott
I don’t know
I’m not sure
But I think
This is it.
SEPT 11
(in honor of the wildfires)
Sequoias SUSAN ESCHBACH
gifting us with lessons
of their survival
thick bark layered against
the destruction of fire
burn wounds
pour flaming life
into their soil
they rise from
rain sun wind ash
orange trunk, green canopy forests
thousands of years
I lean into their furrows
held be great girth
and towering care
Daphne's E-mail DAPHNE SOLA
With effort, I grant the beauty, . . .but I want to go home.
Evangeline
by
Martin Bidney
Here is the forest primeval; the murmuring pines and the hemlocks
Cradled me kindly in childhood, who dreamt what was granted to happen:
“Element wealth has embodied what now through the sleeper conveying,
We, to the wind-breath attentive engendering strength of expression,
Tell what you’ll hear in your ganglia, ramified arteries carmine.”
Aye, the dactylic hexameter, Longfellow-aided, you taught me,
Bringing the tone of Achilles in underworld grave lamentation,
Lauding Ulysses audacious who rivaled the song of the sirens,
Painting Aeneas yet haunted, bewailed of Queen Dido abandoned,
Finding the grandeur of atoms concrescent, divergent, Lucretian.
Breath, Wind, Spirit FRAN MARKOVER
(after a Covid 19 Test)
I stare at the old oak in the yard, solitary
breadth in soughing wind and cutting rain,
leaves, palsied hands above a rooted under-
growth. I think of my foundation: backbone
prevailing in spite of wounds and scars from
fallings, how I’ve weathered through mom’s
hospice, shawled her when she gasped for air,
shouldered siblings during melancholic storms.
What a privilege to remain upright during the
years, still, rising as elder, to share the same
sky and stars, same darkened clouds with all
that live: house spider on my sill, forget-me-
nots bluing June fields, a mouse set free from
my cat’s jaw. A hope: as thunder ceases,
orioles, cardinals, grosbeaks return, recolor
the oaken boughs, the downy tapping wood
holding a history ringed with age, vital with
hidden pulse. That the day’s deluge, the light
and dark infuse roots, trunk, crown, seep into
the foliage. The alchemy: gentle breath.
Sin título IV Santiago Rodriguez
No quiero agobiarte. El mundo hace ya eso bastante. Así que del mundo no te quiero hablar.
O sí, bueno... del mundo quizás.
De una catarina a la orilla de un barranco viendo como ha llegado al fin del mundo, que después de eso solo hay mar.
Una catarina que dice "no mames, soy bien chingona, mira a dónde vine a dar".
Y vuela.
NOW Susan Weitz
The list of all the things
I meant to do
should have done
or wanted to
is lost in the line of trees
that’s receding into
this morning’s somber clouds.
The bluejay on the chimney
won’t help me find it.
“Eat now,” he says,
attacking a seed.
“Lists are for later.”
But a nuthatch angling in
on a vertical wind
reminds me,
“It is always now,
always now.”
September 11 Joanna Green
Nineteen years later
The air is chill
Sky a thickened gray
The kind of day
That invites sorrow
Unlike the day that split the world
Split history before and after
Stole the rose colored glasses
I still can’t find
That day is brilliant
Azure gold
I am in a copy shop
Doing something important
I think like all the others
Until the TV catches our eyes
What we see is impossible
On such a blue sky day
We stop breathing
Transfixed
We watch the tiny speck against the blue
Then the billowing smoke
Hear the voices of confusion
And disbelief
And still the sun shines on
As if in blessing
The jeweled air so crisp
So energized with possibility
You couldn’t dream up such
Perfection
Zebra By Carol Whitlow
My favorite zebra photo from a cherished African safari
greets me each day on my laptop homepage.
The zebra’s head and shoulders are prominent:
long soft curve of his black nose,
thick fuzzy white ears,
warlike headdress of a mane framing his head and neck,
keen white and brownish black stripes.
I wanted to show Mom the videos from my daughter’s wedding,
the wedding Mom could not attend due to ill health, Dad’s death, her dementia.
I turned the laptop on and she saw the zebra.
“What is that animal?” she asked with curiosity. “It looks like a horse.”
(AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PROSE PIECE) DAVID REGENSPAN
My earliest memory consisted of an ascent to the hill country, the northwest border of my childhood world. My father attached a wooden open trailer to our ancient car the summer after I turned three, and off we went to a bungalow colony in some part of the Catskills—where exactly I do not know. What I most recall about the trip was a box turtle my grandfather had apparently found; for a joke he shoved it near my face. At some point the turtle was released into a shallow stream and I seem to recall watching it sit there, stunned perhaps by its ordeal.
From our house in Northern New Jersey, if you looked toward the horizon and squinted, you could just make out the beginnings of the hills, the foothills of the foothills of those Catskills of my turtle. I seem to recall starting in that direction when I was a bit older, with feelings that I suppose could be called wistful for lack of a better word. Perhaps it was that trip I was taken on when I was three, or perhaps the hills were some kind of Jungian symbol for me, but they seemed to represent the end of the known world and the start of a world I wished to know. Hills by their nature both hide and reveal. They block the view of the landscape behind them, yet from their tops one can see for miles. They thus suggest both mystery and vision, dreams and realities.
It is no accident, then, that my adult years were spent northwest of my childhood, in the hills of upstate New York and beyond.
Yoga
Barbara Regenspan
Leave what you know
Let the unknown frontier
tug from your center
and pull outwards
in all directions.
Bend with the rakia,
the ancient Hebrews’
dome of the heavens
and stretch your
play dough likeness
until you and the heavens
learn the sameness
of your substance.
Then print the book
of air from your
template to teach
the lost souls
to live well.
Everything that matters
is already here.
SEPT 10
Conversations Overheard Rob Scott
The phone here never stops ringing.
Can you bring me something in a moment?
The sky was on blue alert.
The meadows almost bled to death.
What happens when something is new?
The trees just stand there.
The rocking chair is one.
The rocks have fallen down again. The rocks are two.
Last night didn’t even last all night.
When can we get take-out now?
The moon is up. Don’t ruin it.
The seance needed more insight.
A melting candle still sends a spark.
My eyes wanted more to see around.
I’m not as down as I used to be.
Don’t sugar coat it. Tell me nothing.
The pastor doesn’t like his new car.
The pink one will have to do.
Some signs mark a way to living.
Am I correct in thinking you know?
I left my glasses in the car wash.
See? 95 was a better year.
Did you know your living room well?
The Persian rug was on standby.
The raindrops need adjusting.
The record player turns on itself.
Not everything belongs in the same world.
What was the last thing I ever said?
Legacy Joanna Green
What sadness where we live
In worlds apart
Disjoint unrecognizeable each
By each what sadness you
Hold like a talisman I would
Run away from
Feel not sad what sadness
Binds you each to each to brethren
To the ancestors I run away from
Forgetting them into my own ambitions
What sadness mine of disappointed smallnesses
Yours
A ribbon of grief stretching
From beginning to end reflecting
Joy shore to shore light to dark
That would make us all
Whole
CAVEAT EDITOR Susan Weitz
When operating on a poem,
reflect before you slice
and disinfect your scalpel
lest you poison paradise.
Each word’s a vital organ,
each line, anatomy.
Use caution when you exercise
your dire authority
for, beating underneath your hand,
petitioning to survive,
a fragile bird is quivering,
exquisite and alive.
Origins Barbara Regenspan
(The poet Galway Kinnell, who died in 2014, saw the bud’s potential in a beauty that might need to be retaught. Apparently, St. Francis was able to do this with a pig. Right now we wonder if it can be done with a country.)
A poet sites St. Francis on self-blessing—
a core of beauty is the bud that blossoms,
he conceives—even a sow flowers,
when re-taught its loveliness.
Did a U.S. bud believe in its flowering
as democracy blessed at conception—
or are we deceived? Was it trampled
too thoroughly at inception?
THE LEANING TREE Daphne Sola
Penny Social FRAN MARKOVER
Once a month, I’d wear my best dress and head for
the temple to place my numbers into cups. Treats
were plentiful: combs, key chains, quilted pot holders,
aprons sewn by women of the congregation. The
knick knacks so enticing but I spent my extra tickets
for big prizes: coupons for Bessie’s Sweet Shoppe,
or the jackpot I coveted and won: a free cut n curl
at Bev’s Shear Magic on Main Street. My hair teased
and lacquered into a page boy like Natalie Wood’s.
But what I recall most was the tingling, the sweat
before the winner of each treasure was announced.
Rosie, head of the Sunshine Ladies, stepped up
to the bimah, pontificating about the tchotchkes
on tables, praising participants who let go of well-
earned pennies and dimes: like Izzy Needleman,
the tailor, leaving zippers and patches at his shop
to bid for trinkets or Herbie, smoking his cigars, the
rings forming little O’s, relieved to be far from the
cow barns. Children stopped fidgeting, adults leaned
closer toward Rosie, her eyes widening as she yelled
to the crowd and the winner is….
*tchotchkes means “knick knacks” or baubles in Yiddish
The Lyptozoic Age
Susan Eschbach
Eucalyptus fronds,
slender, bend from
a glass vase
at once elegant and prehistoric
dusty leaf plates
across a dinosaur's back
Eucalyptosaurus reaches
out of the vase
winding her way, at once
extinct and alive,
to wildflowers
placed so thoughtfully
in a pottery pitcher
Green plateleaves
taste sweet nectar,
memories of life before
tar pits and ice
Scent so subtle
making re-entry
to this flower age
invisible to scientists and dinosticians
Eucalyptosaurus watches
as I write,
grins that I have noticed
her secret return
Me senté y me puse a pensar en qué pensar... Santiago Rodriguez
Me suena absurdo eso de ponerse a pensar en qué pensar, pero lo hacemos todos a veces. Aunque traten de engañarme, lo sé. Aunque algunos no lo admitan, lo tenemos en común. O al menos yo simplemente me rehúso a creer otra cosa. No me cabe en la cabeza. No puedo imaginar que haya alguien allá afuera que siempre sepa en qué pensar, o no necesariamente que lo sepa pero que no se de a la tarea se ponerse a pensar en qué pensar ahora.
Algún tipo que nunca vio una hoja en blanco, quizás.
Qué cabron, no?
Indigo Carol Whitlow
Sometimes a thing happens
So extraordinary, a color, so vivid, vestige of another world,
A small bird, just sitting there as if so ordinary
And small, it was quite small but not tiny
Just under-stated, as if to say
You get this much of this color, but not too much,
and not only a gem’s worth, either,
Enough for you to say:
“now’s there’s a color right out of a dream.”
Have I just crossed over?
It’s clade is called Passerina, which sounds like
passing through, but actually
Means it has toes for perching, which you do have to do,
after all, If you are passing through on a long journey,
you need a brief respite
For body and soul.
If this is a real bird and my real life,
can this life have a few surprises left,
for anyone really?
Anyone willing to look and notice
something just a little different
And so so very beautiful?
And then it flew off, I don’t know where, or if it will return,
Perhaps it’s just passing through to another woods
Or to another person’s dream.
I’ll call it my soul bird, it perches in my heart and
sings when I am in need of
Extraordinary joy, from somewhere, over there,
Either another woods or another, a dream world,
I now know how to access that joy, little colored bird,
Not so little really, in fact,
So very, very important to me.#10 Longfellow Martin Bidney
“For a boy’s will is the wind’s will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.”
For a song’s thrall is in joy’s thrill
As the cutter to his Gordian knots.
Let us “Nay!” say to what Fate plots
And the maelstrom let the brave sails fill!
When a man faces the cast lots,
They a glad Inspire! Infire! can’t still.
Teaneck, New Jersey 1969-71 DAVID REGENSPAN
Textbooks with the added required covers so that they stayed clean when you gave them back at the end of the year. You bought the covers at any dime store with your choice of color or pattern. Textbooks that, in an era before backpacks, weighed as heavy under your arm as a load of new caught fish. Mr. Moore, who found our poetry to be ‘poignant’. Miss Condari, former nun, who found literature to be ‘evocative.’ The doors of the high school: the black kids’ door with graffiti penned on its walls, e.g. ‘we are forty million strong.’ The tough Irish and Italian kids’ door, aka the greasers, with their leather jackets. The everybody else’s door for the Protestant and Jewish kids, with nothing special. The summer I discovered smoking weed and hash in a small hotel in the Catskills, then continued the habit in Teaneck until I got panic attacks and stopped. How the hash tasted, sickly sweet in the back of your throat. Sitting on the hall floor with Judy Spiegel finding stuff to complain about. Judy Spiegel’s frizzy dark blond hair that cascaded over her shoulders. Walking home with Peter Goldman who said ‘You know how you can tell an optimist? When he falls off the Empire State Building and passes the fortieth floor he says ‘well nothing bad’s happened yet.’ Peter’s strange house by the river and his many pet mice. Sherry Belman and her mother who collected orchids.
The bus into Manhattan that first cost thirty-five cents then cost fifty-five cents. Growing hair well past my ears. A denim jacket with a peace sign bleached into it. The Mobilization to End the War with Phil Ochs singing in Central Park, Manhattan. The Moratorium to End the War in Hackensack. The view of the distant hills of northwest New Jersey and the need to get out, get out, get out.
SEPT 9
School Bus Memories #1 Joanna Green
From across the grassy oval punctuated by a flagpole with its
Red white and blue drooping in the still air
I see myself sitting in the fourth yellow school bus
In a line of eight parked along the curving drive of the
Elementary school whose name I forget.
Not the Woodland School, where
I must have been a humble first grader.
Why else would I have been so terrified
Having been told by my big sister,
Not the biggest sister but the one just two years older
And therefore, possibly, more interested in tormenting me,
That if my teacher found out I’d drawn a picture of a penis
I would find it on display above the front door when I
Came to school the next day?
No it’s the other school and I am in fourth grade
And confused. We are going home early,
The President of the United States
Having just been
Shot.
Inside the bus it is hot and we speak in whispers.
Nada que hacer al respecto.
A NIGHT AT THE OPERA Susan Weitz
Scene: a castle courtyard.
The lamps whisper, “Evening.”
Characters assemble, lords and ladies,
encumbered by a tragic plot
and Renaissance attire.
No one moves except an Asian beauty
in red and black,
who glides across the stage
like an omen.
Now the orchestra issues
its own warning:
cymbals, brass, strings mourning
in a minor key.
On a single sustained chord,
the crowd breathes
and the story,
in the shape of a song,
begins.
Yes Susan Eschbach
How do we make this work for children?
I don't know
what about the adults
wait , this will be an option?
Can I do it this way?
I can’t I wont I don't know how
Why is this much screen time ok? for 6year olds? 8?
can you?
will you?
I need help
no one should learn like this
It'll be fun, let's try!
No, we cant, we don’t know
I knew yesterday
really
you might know tomorrow
Everyday our metric for planning
is written on tectonic plates
or dust
or in lung infection, fear, panic
Come let's do this
We can
Can we?
I dont know
We will teach each other
By the end of this long day with teachers
prepping for children
it is late, dark
the Big Dipper walks me through
my northside neighborhood
Cassiopeia sits over east hill
peepers crickets cicadas more pleasant
than the cacophony of
COVID school
Tomorrow
we will know more
?
Cape Cod Martin Bidney
(some people call ‘em sonnets)
Shore is a morgue, and no flattery ìn it;
Ranker and wilder no desert you’ll see.
Crab and a horse-shoe, and clam – in a minute!
Never you’ll guess what you get from the sea.
Dogs in their packs will be ranging, and lately
Crows gleaned the pittance the ebbing had left –
Carcasses, human and animal, stately
Up on a shelf, are of nothing bereft.
Rotting and bleaching, by waves and the light-heat,
Each in a sand-bed is tucked by the tide.
Naked is Nature. Let element light-greet
Sea-gulls a-wheeling in spray where they glide.
I, Henry David, give thanks for your night-tweet!
Martin, our art – let it ever abide!
Witness Fran Markover
If one is quiet, if there’s been enough warmth, rain, mud,
the log a haven from squirrels, they appear early spring:
the yellow spotted salamanders. What a gift to witness
their travels toward ephemeral pools to breed, the same
waters where they’ve been hatched. And the wonders:
mating rituals by tangled beds of buttercups and trillium.
Or the magic: losing one’s leg or part of one’s head, then
to slowly re-grow what’s missing. What’s it like to finesse
a small wet world in such a lithe manner. They journey
en masse, a soft silent army emerging, muscling to and
from underbellies of forest, their bodies ebony, designed
and painted with iridescent suns, the artist unknowable.
RONDELAY SANS RÊGLES Daphne Sola
(After reading Marianne Moore)
What do I do
when a great poet has said it all
and left me with a tongue
emaciated
intertwined thoughts
hanging heavy in the air
yesterday’s washing
on the line?
Who am I
turned wordless?
I can walk and swim and climb
yet my senses tumble down
a tamed animal
supine and quivering
stroked and scratched
soothed and raked
by the shiny pointed nails
of another’s sublime gift.
But Who I Am
has temerity
I cling to being that animal
and in a thousand years
brought down to a thousand hours
the bristly hair on my back
becomes down
my smitten brain will flower
my cold hands grip a pen
and Who I Am
writes a river of words
revelations of nascent power
which, at least,
on first draft,
will be pleasing to me.
IN BLACK AND WHITE Rob Scott
The photograph isn’t what was photographed, it’s something else.
-- Garry Winogrand
I sit on a bench
On the shore
Of a small lake
Where I have come to
Awake in the morning
And compose myself
A shot for my camera
To take without
A sound I rise
And hear what is
In the silence within
My mind perceives
The scrim of waves
Beating gently against
The rocks and the rocks
Themselves turn into
Waves and stir my mind
Until the photograph
I take becomes shorthand
For what I have seen
And what I have not
The Handoff David Regenspan
My old high school friend Judith lives in Los Angeles. We communicate once or twice weekly via Skype, that strange new method of seeing and hearing another human being who is not really there. I use a tablet computer when I speak to my friend, which means that I hold her in my hands as we speak. It is a literal experiencing of the phrase “a conversation that has weight.”
“I put Gracie down,” you said to me last night as, in this instance, I tried to balance my tablet precariously upright against a napkin holder. Gracie was the friendly black cat that Judith had for almost nineteen years. The animal was ailing for some time; it came as no surprise that she had to be put down. My friend had the sort of look of sorrow people have when they lose an animal. Not a total sorrow, more like a hesitant sorrow, a sorrow played with a flute instead of a harsh trumpet. A sorrow that sheepishly seeks permission to express itself, as if to say, this is a world full of death. Dare I add my sorrow of the loss of a pet to a world already full of the deaths of human beings?
This is, of course, now a time of human death from a new virus for which human bodies have no immunity. And this time of contagion and pandemic is what colored Judith’s experience of Gracie’s final visit to the vet. For the duration of the virus, no person other than staff was to be allowed into the veterinary clinic. Animals had to be handed off in the parking lot, whether in a carrier or on a leash. In Judith’s case, she handed off Gracie in her cat carrier. After a while, an empty carrier was handed back to her. It was as if she made her animal disappear.
All of our conversations now have weight. The weight of a cat carrier being handed across a void. The weight of computers and tablets and phones broadcasting phantom faces and voices. All of us can now disappear. Our conversations are mere images and sounds that can be canceled with the click of a mouse or the touch of a button. Real weight, the weight of a hand shaken or a body embraced, is no longer there.
This era of the virus will be remembered in many different ways. I suspect that, years from now, one of the first images that will come to my mind is the image of that empty cat carrier being handed over in a parking lot. It will enter my thoughts softly, almost silent, like the sound of an animal breathing it final breath.
Poetry and Air Quality Barbara Regenspan
In those days, forgiveness was in the air: between my children, between some heads of state, between my black and white students. All over the WEB it was presented as the theme of applied American Buddhism. A rabbi explained on NPR how his work on forgiveness led to his alliance with Palestinian resistance to the military occupation. A young woman in class said she now understood that she had to forgive her crack-addicted mother for abandoning her child, this student.
SEPT 8
The man in the blue kayak Carol Whitlow
I approached the shore slowly
giving him time to push off -
there was clicking and snapping
And I thought: A fisherman? His rods ‘n reels ‘n fishing toys -
But a kayak doesn’t have much room for toys
or trophies.
Then I thought: A photographer? His tripods, lenses, filters,
waterproof bags -
A kayak is good for stealthy approaches
on turtles sunning or geese preening
or barely submerged tree root sculptures.
He was still strapping in as I glided to shore -
A broad-chested man with silver waves on his head
And a trimmed silver beard,
He spoke New Joi-sey, which is a surprise
this being rural upstate New York.
He told me he had 9 kayaks,
once had a Walden Vista like mine
knew the company had gone out of business.
I told him about the time I got caught in a strainer on Fall Creek,
the Vista being too long for strong currents.
And he told me about ocean kayaking
And needing one you can roll in and get out of, that won’t fill with water.
And he told me about tossing this blue one
down a steep slope, on a rope,
it being tough and trustworthy –
Then he climbed down after it to
do the reservoir.
We laughed at the audacity.
And he told me how he thought he’d die
when he was caught between wind-swept waves
And perpendicular big-ship wake
And he in his little kayak not knowing
which way to roll.
And he told me he had multiple sclerosis as he strapped
his leg braces on the blue kayak
with neat little black Velcro woven tabs.
And we said “Enjoy the afternoon”.
Since then he has been paddling
around my mind -
His tough resilience, his rolling with the waves,
And how he trusts his body and his spirit to prevail.
I want a kayak like that.
Fossil David Regenspan
An unremarkable moment,
A bit of sea floor:
Brachiopod, crinoid, coral, bryozoa,
Bits and pieces of animal
Mashed into bottom mud,
Nothing to notice.
This was half a billion years ago.
Now it is shale, a rock in a cabinet.
Time makes no sense,
The moments that slide out of existence:
The first step, the first kiss, the first child.
Todo lo puedo echar a perder Santiago Rodriguez
Estoy tratando de pensar en algo lindo.
¿Has visto en internet las cabras que se asustan o se emocionan y se desmayan?
O en una tortilla de harina con mantequilla.
O el señor de la tiendita que a todos trata bien.
O, al menos eso es lo que me ha tocado ver.
Seguramente lo estoy reduciendo a los ratitos en que me ha tocado verlo, pero es una persona completa, como tú y como yo, con sus problemas. ¿Y tal vez no trata bien a todos?
Tal vez.
¿Ya ves? Todo lo puedo echar a perder.
Tortillas de harina con mantequilla pues, pensemos en eso mejor, en vez de empezar a imaginar qué cosas no tan buenas habrá hecho o no el señor de la tiendita.
Diving In Fran Markover
Sarah, 6 years old, plunges into the lake with her uncle.
She’s fearless unlike how I was: scaredy cat at her age.
We’re at the Seaside Inn : a child’s paradise: pebbly
beach, long dock, acrobatic barn swallows. There’s
Annie, Sarah’s playmate, in a red plastic tube pulled
by her father in his ski-mobile. She shrieks, sprayed by
foamy clouds, her arms like wings. On shore, Jonathan
sifts through sand for fossils. He unearths trilobites,
brachiopods and a lucky stone. No ancient coral, so far!
Barb, another first grader, builds stone cairns reflecting
glimmers of sun: mini- Stonehenges. She leaves her mark
for us landlubbers. All the while Sarah continues leaps
off the dock into the murky waters. “I love that there’s
no sharks,” she hollers into the gentle winds, her mother
tensing with each of her child’s belly flops. She whispers,
“What are children for, if not to jump-start one’s heart.”
All of it Susan Eschbach
Early September air
cool moving in
clears the heat
creates a wind
catches me up
tosses me back
to eight
to wild yearning
a heart burst wide open
for a bike a tree a girl
flying climbing leaping
in love
arms flung
wanting the world
the wonder and wow of it
School soon
clatter and clutter
thrill and fear
wanting to devour all of it
all
As light faded
dusk moved us to calm
into the house
to wash
to read
to sleep
Something of a magnificence then
Felt it just now
What Does the Wind Say? Susan Weitz
It’s arguing with the aspens.
About what?
The usual, I think: Who’s strongest.
And who IS strongest?
The wind, of course.
Why the wind?
Well, it bends the aspen
till it scrapes the earth.
But doesn’t the aspen unbend
when the wind is spent?
Isn’t it cleverer than the wind,
visiting its grounded neighbors
while the wind tires itself,
since, like a shark, it has to move
to stay alive?
Oh—
Oh, what?
I think I hear the wind’s words now.
So, what does the wind say?
“Hello, you’re lovely, forgive me,
goodbye.”
Interference Again Barbara Regenspan
“I think my idealism has caught up to my grief”
I said to the therapist in the dream, in a moment
of revelation that’s gone now.
I know we both thought I was there—finally—
after all these years of something to figure out,
and in the precious moments of awakening
it was going to make a difference—
a reinvention of the wheel that would work
this time—a forward movement that would not fail—
the tweak we had missed while changing the focus—
admiring the mountain, and lifting the baby—
a circumvention of power used wrong,
unraveling all the bad that had ever transpired—
leaving one giant circle of us, all holding hands
and smiling, even the cultures who find
eye contact rude. (It’s okay just this once.)
Then, the flash of polished cotton fabric
featuring those puffy children whose hands
touch in zig-zag, colors different but primary,
all the same size and shape, all the smiles alike,
hanging on the cinder block wall between classrooms
where my reading group was “robins”
and I wouldn’t be an “eagle” until grad school,
and people would notice the too-great effort that got me there
and the buried grief beneath the idealism.
When reality creeps back, Anna Freud
issues the reminder: “All education is interference,”
unlike in the dreamworld, where knowledge floats
and is grabbable for lucky moments
that sometimes produce poems.
Ed, Walt, and Em
another fun fourteener
by
Martin Bidney
“Thoughts on Ed? Well, despair is a thing I deplore,
So I try to forget ‘nevermore’ –
Yet, whenever I think about Annabel Lee,
There’s that lonely old moan of the sea…”
“Death and Mother and Sleep, and the Stars – what a sweep!
But the ocean herself seemed to weep –
Let me ask you then, Walt, are you thinking of Ed
While you write of the living-and-dead?”
“Don’t forget about me,” chimed in Emily. “He
And I too like to sing of the sea.
It desired to consume me! How quickly I turned
To the town! Quite a lesson we’d learned –
I’m referring to me and the dog I had brought –
But I – cannot – quite – finish – my thought
Restraint Joanna Green
This morning it occurs to me
To write a poem about
Wiping my ass
As it occurs to me
Sometimes
To jump off a cliff
I consider it
And decline
For now
Ghostly No More Rob Scott
Moonlight invites being bodiless,
Softening the ground on which we walk.
Our days are ruled by rationality.
Now’s the chance to strike out on our own.
The waxing light covers the shadow
Domes of weeping willows in the dark.
An eclipse would doom us. Down
By the water’s edge, one is solitary,
Miraculous in the hours to come,
A kind of exhaustion peels off
Our skins set loose by the tide.
This is the nudge; the moment come.
And so, we step off an inner shore,
The puzzle of life behind us,
Mischief is the accelerant, go
Anonymous to the parade of souls.
The man in the blue kayak by Carol Whitlow
I approached the shore slowly
giving him time to push off -
there was clicking and snapping
And I thought: A fisherman? His rods ‘n reels ‘n fishing toys -
But a kayak doesn’t have much room for toys
or trophies.
Then I thought: A photographer? His tripods, lenses, filters,
waterproof bags -
A kayak is good for stealthy approaches
on turtles sunning or geese preening
or barely submerged tree root sculptures.
He was still strapping in as I glided to shore -
A broad-chested man with silver waves on his head
And a trimmed silver beard,
He spoke New Joi-sey, which is a surprise
this being rural upstate New York.
He told me he had 9 kayaks,
once had a Walden Vista like mine
knew the company had gone out of business.
I told him about the time I got caught in a strainer on Fall Creek,
the Vista being too long for strong currents.
And he told me about ocean kayaking
And needing one you can roll in and get out of, that won’t fill with water.
And he told me about tossing this blue one
down a steep slope, on a rope,
it being tough and trustworthy –
Then he climbed down after it to
do the reservoir.
We laughed at the audacity.
And he told me how he thought he’d die
when he was caught between wind-swept waves
And perpendicular big-ship wake
And he in his little kayak not knowing
which way to roll.
And he told me he had multiple sclerosis as he strapped
his leg braces on the blue kayak
with neat little black Velcro woven tabs.
And we said “Enjoy the afternoon”.
Since then he has been paddling
around my mind -
His tough resilience, his rolling with the waves,
And how he trusts his body and his spirit to prevail.
I want a kayak like that.
SEPT 7
PUNDITRY Joanna Green
10
Can you believe
We have never seen
No one has ever
9 Not technically a crime
Challenging norms
What can I do about
This is the most disturbing
8 What do you think this means for
Not since the civil war
How can people 7
No one is above the law
What remedy do we
There is no guarantee that
5 Possibly more fragile than
I’m beginning to feel like
Above 4 the rule of law
No one is the rule of law 3
2 It may be too late for
1 This could be the
0
Psalm for the Caretaker Fran Markover
Mornings, he pulls weeds at the cemetery.
Here, he’s close to his parents, to the baby sister he never met,
her grave found when he divined it by holding a metal rod.
He pushes a rusty mower by the rows, nodding at names,
carved cherubs, flags waving like wings. He tips his cap
to the men who taught him to pitch fastballs, offers thanks
to the church ladies who latticed rhubarb pies with trickles
of honey for the bereaved. In August heat, he’s sweat
and muscle, grass clippings flying onto the buttercups.
It’s a blessing: the quiet, the solitary birds perching on stone,
wind on his face like gentle souls passing. Here, he’s a good son
tending to his family as if they’re rocking on the porch on an
ordinary Sunday, nodding as he hoses the garden, gathers
plump tomatoes for supper, plucks a melon for dessert, parents
asking if he could pick lilies from the field. As if his mother’s
small still voice rises from the ground or from the kitchen,
saying “Oh, my god! I’ll be darned, those flowers, I’ll be tickled.
Give them grandma’s vase, some water so they’ll last…..”
Advice from a rock Carol Whitlow
Forever is not such a long time.
I have been other forms – gas, liquid,
What are a few chips off my solid form?
Early on, there was too much heat, too much excitement.
Slowing down is good.
Do you know what Patience is?
It is being what is needed now
And then – be what is needed then.
Why try to be a form that cannot be
Sustained?
I know I will survive –
therein lies my strength, my beauty.
GOOGLE DIRECTIONS Rob Scott
Head out
By going L on TIME
Go around the bend
Until U hit SPACE
Drive on SPACE until U
Meet at the crossroads
Of almost EVERYTHING
Go until U stop at NOTHING
Then turn R
Which should bring U
Back to TIME again
Go to the end of TIME.
There U are!
To reverse direction(s)
Start again but instead
Go R on TIME
Sin título III Santiago Rodriguez
Mi abuelito nunca daba gracias antes de comer. Siempre se esperaba hasta el final. No le gustaba dar las gracias a Dios por adelantado.
"¿Qué tal si se me atora algo y ahí quedo asfixiado?"
Es una de esas cosas que siempre me gustaron de mi abuelo.
Una fe pragmática, dentro de lo que cabe.
I AM LOOKING FOR A PEG . . . DAPHNE SOLA
to hang my hat on . . .
perhaps not hard enough . . .
not a peg to be found
strange wish
since I am one who never wears a hat
and has never worn one
always searching for the real
in a jungle of intangibles
more likely to luxuriate in a tumble of hair
brash and bare-headed
I seek no cover
wear no glove
but savor each ridge of a crustaceous earth
all the while knowing it to be unheeding
yet, I hope, a little kind
and will tear my skin
with its roughness
only by accident.
I am sometimes foolish
and think how often
that has led to newness
the taste of spice
in what should have been
my daily fare.
When I hear cries hidden by the crest
of a hill
some pitiable
some joyful
I wear no hat, no body-armor
but I have to find out
what . . .who . . .why?
Just give me a minute
to take off my shoes
and dig my toes into bare earth
before I join the party.
7 Em and Walt
a fun fourteener
Martin Bidney
“Wondrous weather – it’s better than anyone thought!
Arms enfolded, it’s time we were starting a jig!
You can leave ’em right here – the big hats you have brought:
Let us paint the town blue, and let’s do it up big!
And to capture the smiles – we’ll do photos, okay?
Walt, the waves in your beard go with Emily’s hair!
It is straight, that is true, but the strands gone astray
Made me think of the sand, and the sea-salty air!”
“I’d been writing of ‘parting,’ but – gee! – you’ve an art,
With that fiddle of yours, and that Irish-type flair,
That is making me restive, unsettled, and more…”
“Em is right! Brooklyn Ferry can barely compare!
Peter Doyle came to mind, with that fiddle-tune there!
I am dancing – can’t help it! – the world is our shore!”
Poetry? SUSAN ESCHBACH
What if no poem
writes itself tonight
I told myself
30, one a day, like a vitamin
it’s good for me write
and let it go
Let it go…it a poem
it an insight
a wish
desire
sweet moment
legoprincessking was easy
Tonight I feel…..
old
thin skin
gouged by enthusiastic paws
left foot
bunion red sore ugly
and what about kegels
Is this
oversharing
overwhining
overwhelming my own
9 year old boyself
who cares about
woodsmoke
matches
maple
mud
Why do I not feel….
wise?
Is this a poem?
LABYRINTH
From here to there,
from then to now,
from you to me,
the path is anything
but straight.
The shortest distance
between this and that
is a labyrinth--
a narrow, twisted path
where each new curve
is unexpected,
invisible,
and no easier from any
point of entry,
even though we each think
ours is the most
obscure.
Most of us are fretting
over turns and turnarounds
and whether we’ve
lost our way,
but it occurs
to a few
that at some point
the labyrinth ends--
and what then?
What then?
I am so throwin’ away my. bra
I am so throwin’ away my. bra
You know it really doesn’t matter
There’re No illusions left to shatter
I am so throwin’ away my. bra
State of Hope and Disaster David Regenspan
My friend in L.A. calls California the State of Disaster;
She says that it was one hundred fifteen degrees yesterday
And besides, the state is burning up. What hope is there?
I don’t know about hope. Louisiana is flooded
By a super hurricane, Iowa ruined by a storm;
They say this is the world now. Fire and wind and water.
Hope doesn’t enter into it, I guess. Especially
When, a hundred years from now, the coasts
Will be underwater. What does one then do?
Do? Right now we watch the leaves of autumn turn,
Making trees look like a child’s drawings in red and yellow.
And look, the blue heron lands in the creek. The crow calls his demands.
Not good enough. But then, what’s good enough?
To keep a crooked faith in this torn-up world.
For Whom Is It? Barbara Regenspan
If the personal is political, we’re in more trouble and less trouble than we thought. Oh, really, how is that? Make up your mind: more trouble or less trouble. I need clarity.
Clarity is “Borgen” now on Netflix: It’s all compromise and what you can get away with. Who is the opposition from whom we get away? Is it white supremacists? Is it science deniers?
Is it the ones who hope for disaster as the ultimate drama? Kind of takes your mind off things. What things? Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night to check how bad the disaster is.
The fires, the floods, the losses in shot protesters? Am I courting disaster? Am I loving disaster? Disaster is always worse than I am—that’s its advantage.
I hold the center writing letters, meditating. Police abolition is not the center, but it might be what survival requires. Survival when and until when? It will all end someday.
The sun will burn out. We don’t live forever. Some days I can’t believe how totally gone my old dead friends are. Their poems only archived. Their struggles with weight ridiculous.
And it was 115 degrees in LA yesterday. It was beautiful in Ithaca, here where I live. 68 in the morning and 73 by 4 pm. Perfect! I walked with a friend at 6:30. Still beautiful, even through masks. And we kept saying:
This is life. This is where we need to be—what we need to be doing.
Up here in Cornell’s miles of arboreta. Who maintains them? Are they essential workers or well-paid regulars inside the higher ed bubble,
inside western tradition, which I secretly love and even defend at faculty meetings when some colleagues are down on Freud, down on Marx. Get them talking to each other; it’s a quality conversation.
What about the streets, the protests—being an ally? I’ll write a letter later. Now I need yoga. Yoga teachers need support. They are getting doubts during this pandemic. It’s a disaster.
I need a flexible back to write my letters—to offer my arguments on e-mail. I don’t do social media. Does anybody read them? Excuse me. I don’t do social media.
Too much is written to provoke reaction and anxiety. Your letters—who are they for—
Do you mean, “For whom are they?” This is a poem. Nobody will read it.
SEPT 6:
FLIGHT
Today, a feather’s left for me
as small as half my hand.
It’s painted like a chickadee
and softer than a frond.
It might have caught the wind and spun
in pinwheels from the floor,
but patiently it sat beneath
the feeder by my door.
Whoever owned it may return.
If so, I hope that he
will leave this small memento
of the infinite with me.
This is how you do it Carol Mae Whitlow
This is how you do it:
You wake up to the dawn and stretch your hands skyward.
You appreciate the day as it unfolds, as the light brightens,
You listen to the voices of brothers and sisters worldwide,
You tune in, tune up, search out,
You become one of those voices, speak up,
Speak out, speak clearly,
Or sing, or write, and publish your words where they can be found
Or join with others – a march, a demonstration,
Get arrested at the lunch counter.
You knit pink hats, you put them on tree branches,
You knit a pink hat as large as your car
You paint a mural of pink hats,
You offer a class of doll-making with pink hats.
You get their attention
You answer their questions
You teach the world that didn’t know
That hadn’t heard
That wakes up wanting
This is how you do it – give them a souvenir, a pink hat,
A doll with a pink hat (or a green one),
A prayer doll,
A prayer shawl,
Prayer beads,
Prayer flags,
Prayer wheels
Help them see and feel what it is
To allow yourself to hope
To transform imagination into
A color, a shape, a word, a gesture,
To transform a dream into reality.
This is how you do it
Appreciate the day, its gifts, as it
Colors the western sky
And quietens into stars and
Moon beams
Deep remembering in dreams.
Whitman
Martin Bidney
“Walt, the weather’s getting odder…
Summer, fall? Let’s take a stroll.”
“Sure, I’ll go. I’m ‘on a roll.’”
“‘Helpless to a red marauder?’”
“We-e-ll… but now I’m feeling stronger.
Big adventurer – that’s me!
Want to spot what’s there to see.
Can’t take boredom any longer,
Need to walk on leaves of grass.”
“Blades?” “A little too aggressive…
Gentleness I find impressive –
Loafe, and sense a shadow pass…
Emily! I saw you coming! –
Think the fall is here to stay?”
“Certain slant of light, I’d say –
Plus, I hear a distant drumming….”
Blue rock Susan Eschbach
Centuries old,
from cold creek beds
by old forges incinerating Pennsylvania pine,
blazing until iron melts away from
limestone and pours into liquid winter,
hardens to blue.
As though the
brilliant sky
in the lake
becomes crystal
As though our
brightest dreams,
with fire, are emboldened.
Tree fire water
Blu
During the time of Covid, I bless the names Fran Markover
in honor of Chris “King” Garcia
I hold onto words grandmother brought from the old country:
one lives as long as one is remembered. And in early morning
I begin a long country walk by the lake, recite names of the dead.
Pray for their families facing empty chairs. I start with A─
Aadhvi Aya, the text she read in hospice from her daughter,
“I need my mommy. Come back.” Come back, Tom Blackwell,
whose photographs embued the inanimate with new light.
I wish divine sparks for Ed Ciocca, fireman buried by collegial
first responders, sea of blue caps, dress uniforms, baby blue
surgical masks. I send sorrow to Wogene Debele who birthed
a baby boy she never met. Recite names of Holocaust survivors
Lillian Eckstein and Margret Feldman, outliving viruses of hate,
but not Covid, fathoming in a deep way, how love liberates.
Love to Annie Glenn, astronaut’s wife, lost in our vast cosmos.
Love to Skylar Herbert, 5 years old, who loved stuffed animals,
grandma’s dog, princess costumes. I say life well lived
to Aracelli Buendia Ilagan, nurse, mission: serving patients
for 3 decades, dying alone. Say it’s fine to rest, Anick Jesdanun,
his record 83 marathons and Kim King-Smith, EKG tech who
measured our hearts. With a heavy one, I grieve Jay-Natalie
La Santa, 5 months old, wearing a rose-gold dress with sparkly
roses for her funeral, the outfit sewn for her father’s
firemen’s graduation. I send hallelujahs for prison chaplain
Rufus McClendon, Jr. His sermon: every inmate is created in
God’s image. I honor the luminosity of Guillermina Narango
who blew out 90 years’ worth of candles. Honor our ever-
lasting ties to each other, the black belt draped over the
urn of Karate Master Teriyuki Okazaki, expert in circular moves
and steady breath. Lost from our circle, Janice Prescel, founder
of Helping Hands Food Pantry, member of a sister temple.
May her name live as blessing. May there be final whistles
for Omar Quintana, whose passion was scored on soccer fields.
Final bows for conductor Joel Revzen, who led an Opera’s
orchestra. I imagine his Puccini’s Butterfly flitting heaven-
ward. Conjure the karaoke of Alvin Simmons, janitor, who lip-
synced to Luther Vandross. Perhaps he offers “Endless Love,”
in celestial hallways to the Teplays, wed for 53 years, dying
within an hour of each other. I hope for divine high-fives, for
teammates to cheer Bill Underwood, Little League Coach. His
guidance: Show up. Treat others fairly. Do your best. I whisper
the name Sandra Santos-Vizcaino, as if as if I’m in her third
grade classroom, PS 9, Brooklyn. Celebrate Robert Washington,
devoted dad who drove his daughter’s cat 11 hours in his car
to be with her. I thank Marny Xiang, school board chair, fighter
for diversity as refugee from South East Asia. And deep in the
forest, beyond the lake, a woodpecker taps for vets Michael Yun,
builder of memorials for the Korean War and Daniel Zane,
WWII survivor, who dashed across fields to save another soldier.
His last battle ending two days after his wife of 7 decades
died. And as I finish my walk, the lake shrouded in mist, I picture
a funereal curtain, how all the names rise together. A soft rain
falls: decrescendo for a dirge.
Rock and Roll Joanna Green
Get this: Child of the happy 50’s suburbs
With a full-time mom and family dinners every night, homework by the
fireplace, music lessons for all 5 kids and college too, a limitless future, faith
in the goodness of humanity, the arc bending towards justice...
Now finds herself in shock, sliding
Down the steep backside of progress, tumbling towards history’s gutter,
straightened teeth now broken, spitting the grit of the oppressed.
Ready to Rock and Roll.
biblical criticism David Regenspan
emptiness of emptiness said the preacher
emptiness of emptiness all is empty
thus said King Solomon in Ecclesiastes except
saying that Solomon indeed wrote it is an empty claim
seeing that Ecclesiastes is part of the Wisdom Literature
and therefore Greek influenced and therefore
written much later in time than the time
of a Hebrew king who filled an empty spot on a mountain
with a temple and then claimed that the empty room within it
was the Holy of Holies filled with God but emptiness
is all you get in that room
if Mount Sinai was empty and the desert was empty
because they say that if half a million people really did come out of Egypt
and cross that desert
something of their passage would mark that desert today
but there is nothing it is empty apart from
the tracks of the Bedouins and ibex
the margins of my Bible are empty I make no comment
but the shelf is not empty
the book is there
and that will have to be enough
It’s Not A Poem Yet, But Maybe It Has Potential Barbara Regenspan
“Everything cobbles itself on the rubble of ancient cities,”
I paraphrased poetically from Freud, a long time ago
but it never got the attention I had hoped for, and
I keep inserting it here and there, waiting for a contest
judged by someone who secretly loves me.
This morning it came to mind again during the funeral
on Zoom of a dear friend’s father. He had clearly
done everything, despite Jewish quotas, and as a famous
pediatric surgeon, had saved the lives of children.
A nephew spoke of people accosting him on the street
to thank him for saving their lives. At first the nephew
said, “and he didn’t even remember who they were
when I asked,” and then, thought better, and with a
telling smile, added, “but usually he did.”
Neither of my parents ever forgot a life they had saved.
He could be cruel. She kept too much hidden; I doubt
that I really knew her. In the balance of knowing their
trials, and knowing their joys, I learned more of the former,
while my dead friend’s father, apparently never complained.
I do; but I have learned to lead with kindness and say what’s
on my mind; you probably know me if you know me. The
standards were not that high, you could say, but the setting
required work at self-preservation. Is it a greater gift to be born
from greatness, or to cobble from rubble what you can?
SEPT 5:
Fran Markover
Coming Home
After I tried to shovel in the hollow,
after my young brother’s funeral,
I watch the black ant, let him pass.
The morsel it carries twice his size.
The ant struggling toward his nest
deep in darkened cracks of the wall.
What he carries left for the others.
GRIEF Rob Scott
A tree bends
In the night
Moonlight falling
On its branches
Jeweled morning Carol Whitlow
Purple morning glory blossom
Kisses green tomato twins.
Red cardinal sings for joy
Two whistles - 4 twists,
Finches announce themselves in gay twitters and crescendos
As they flit amongst the branches
In their yellow coats.
Locust song, cricket chirp,
Final summer concert
That leaves my ear
Aching all winter for just a taste of memory
Of the world alive with all beings.
Cool September morning -
Raindrops like diamonds
sparkle on tips of leaves,
Cold nights turn dogwood into
A tree of emeralds, rubies, amber.
I awake to the oblique autumn light
Of glorious dawn.
However fleeting, these warm colors
Set my heart ablaze.
Those of us whose hearts
Are hemorrhaging love
Where does it go?
What does it become?
Do we run dry?
Do we refill at a spring somewhere?
Does it change us?
The Jewish Cemetery at Willard David Regenspan
It is twice forgotten:
A former cemetery
At a former hospital for the insane.
In a meadow on a hill
The crazy dead are buried, unmarked
Except by a metal spike bearing a number,
Names going unremembered,
So that the families would not be shamed.
At one end of the meadow are the Jews.
Once, their special corner was overgrown with bushes and briers,
Their presence announced by a simple metal arch
That read: The Jewish Cemetery at Willard,
The arch itself nearly covered by jungle.
I liked it then. The Jews
Were the forgotten of the forgotten,
No one even remembering
Who made the arch, or why they bothered.
Some years ago the Jewish land was cleared,
A new sign erected in clear letters—this
By a congregation that needed a project.
The sign was made, the prayers were said,
And the crazy Jewish dead
Left alone once more.
I think of visiting and never do, thinking
That the foxes and coyotes are visitors enough,
Their sniffings and their howls
Memorial enough.
In Liberia Gail Holst-Warhaft
In Liberia before the war
women opened the windows
when they cooked and added basil
so the smell would be stronger
and people passing by
would know they were welcome.
No-one opens the windows
when they cook any more.
That’s how you know
things have changed says Jackie
wrapped in her grey sweater
against the spring cold.
She doesn’t mention darker things
that happened outside the window.
For her it’s all said
in the kitchen. Her mother counting
cups of rice, the basil
unpicked in its pot.
RESILIENCE Rob Scott
X
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ob – serve back
the low-ly
ping pong ball
#######
& its ability
to bounce
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
X
LegoPrincessKing Susan Eschbach
You be the King.
Here.
I hold the Legoperson
In the pink ballgown
This is the king?
Yes, of course.
Join your wife in this.
The Frozen lego castle?
Yes
Wait! We stay outside, oh,
We just got a text
The virus is over. Now
we go inside.
And this is the king?
Yes, go in to sleep under the
Frozen staircase
OK
Here are her pajamas.
OK
Who holds more hope for us
Than a five year old?
On Having Left Maui But Never Really Joanna Green
Soft... This morning air, wet and gilded
By sun after last night’s voluptuous rains
The hills lie languorous, stretched against sky
Caressed by such strange warm wind, unfamiliar
To this northern here and now but bone deep
In memory: the trade winds of Maui
The inexplicable solace in their force and flow
The magic – stop – the daily awe
Given up for steadier? things - jobs, schools...
I glide on bicycle through the luminous breeze
Slide between worlds, shifting landscapes
Of sight and memory, of yearning
And accepting, dreaming myself home to
Anywhere, everywhere
PLANS Susan Weitz
I planted seeds
and weeds grew,
grateful for a home.
I heard the wind sing
as it blew the birch tree down.
Today’s tenuous clouds
are transports for tomorrow’s rain.
Why make plans?
Our disappointment
is somebody’s joy.
Let’s admire the clean and granular snow
even though we were wishing for
chrysanthemums.
I’ve been telling…
Martin Bidney
I’ve been telling of Emily, squirrels and more,
But it’s only the start of the sweet we’ve in store
With our anapest horses of Brandenburg Three:
Hear them stamping and snorting? Their glory adore!
Are you psyched for some travel? Then listen to me:
Lazy writers today are too prosy. But we
Have been lent from the Heaven the red and the gold
That the birds had predicted, with scriptural glee!
Why be diffident, timid? The holy are bold!
Every day novel psalm hath our story extolled!
And the place where we dwell is the work of the Lord!
And the worthiest thought we in mirth may unfold!
We were just resurrected – the waker’s reward:
Come and zither with me to a Dorian chord!
They’ll be never alone who are lured by our lore:
On the pinions of hymn had our speare-shaker soared.
Education Barbara Regenspan
We were hippies and
Sarah did things in her own time,
but she begged to go to Ben’s daycare
with the Inuit mural behind the Tastee Freeze.
“I’m sorry, Barbara,” said Mrs. Fleming,
director of Children’s Hours, while
3-year-old Sarah, holding my hand,
practiced her skip on the carpet.
“We don’t take children in diapers.”
Out on the parking lot, Sarah stops
suddenly, yanking back my arm,
frees her own, bends down, untapes
her diaper, and heaves it
into the Tastee Freeze trash bin.
“I don’t wear diapers. I’m potty-trained
now,” Sarah says.
And so she was.
Thirty years later, I marvel at the certainty—
the discipline of a three-year-old who knows
what’s worth the trade-offs, and puts her faith
in brother, art, and school.
SEPT 4:
The Kind of Dreams We Are Having Now Joanna Green
Nancy Pelosi and I walk along a rural road.
A newscaster follows, skirting mailboxes,
A large crumb on her face which she flicks away
As, no doubt, a voice in her invisible earbuds
Instructs.
Even Pelosi has begun to panic.
She turns around, looks up the road and down.
We are like a school of fish only now
Sensing the net that closes in around us.
But November 3rd is coming!
Someone shouts.
We were all such fools.
(for Poppers) Susan Eschbach
Small
sleek
brindled
yet
a muscled beast
you
yank and pull
stop and sniff
Squirrels tease
Cats taunt
you try tracking
yet
you lose each time
no match for their guile
We walk stop pull
my shoulder socket loosens
Nightly I wait
to bag your shit
bag to the bin
leashed we are
This poem is not
poignant
This slice of life
not profound
It is composed along the sidewalk
Baby Sister Fran Markover
Once, I held the ocean, a seashell to my ear,
the dead whispering their breathy pearls.
I remember this between headstones
as we tiptoe near the dark of your nursery.
Do you rest beyond anonymous weeds, quivers
of crocuses for comfort, a neighbor robin
celebrating his worm? What rock-a-bye world
receives you in its blanket? Distant geese
muscle into homecoming ribbons. You asleep,
chartless, tucked beneath deep tender folds
of earth. We, the living, divining the daffodils.
SEPTEMBER
Everything looks better against a blue sky, said
some landscape painter, somewhere,
and this September afternoon agrees.
Nodding also are the trees, exceptionally green
aside from a few foreboding boughs.
How the sky’s canvas stretches, and across it
Cirrus and Nimbus, Greek gods of disguise,
try out their poses,
while their baby brother Cumulus pretends
he’s a mighty mountain, mischievously rising,
then melting into the wooded hills.
This is the first of my farewells,
to the cryptic chipmunk sniffing for seeds,
to the caress of Mother Air
over the cooling loam,
to all the golden, flitting, singing things,
to this gentle world.
#4 Jocular Sonnet
Martin Bidney
With a jocular sonnet, good times you’ll enjoy.
Jocoserious, tragi-comedic – a toy,
To arise in a bubble with speed and expand
To a world at the touch of your magical hand!
No, I haven’t forgotten the tragical part –
Yet – momentous the moment! so lighten your heart,
For I hear it outside – the applause of the trees
For the storm that uproarious energy frees!
Let a multivociferous antiphon choir
In your sonnet reply to the cry of desire!
’Twas predicted by squirrels in lines I had writ;
Friendly Emily winked at me, thinking of it…
For the simmer of summer a something of cool –
And a brisking of skill with our worldening tool!
Fighting Conch David Regenspan
It is lovely, but not too much so,
Spiked yet rounded,
Brown yet streaked,
Not large and proud like the conchs that are blown
Like trumpets. The bodiless shell
Is all I have of it, found on a Florida beach
Sitting tame as if in a shell shop. I am told
It gets its name because the living snail
Flails like the tail of a dog
When picked up, a tactic meant
To cause a gull or curious human
To drop it in surprise. Is this fighting
Or a con job? Did the animal my shell contained
Lose a battle or merely fade away?
It is not my job to care, merely bear
Witness. The shell is cool in my fingers,
Modest on its shelf, but hard
As anything must be to stay in the world.
THE BEE-KEEPER Daphne Sola
My father loved bees and
it was the one thing I loved about him.
He moved among them
pulling out trays, brushing them off his sleeves,
always holding with them a gravelly conversation.
He was shrouded in netting - - but carelessly - -
all his trust in the close relationship
he had with his charges
and the bees never disappointed,
they only stung the neighbors.
Away from his bees and roses
my father was a fierce man,
burly, gruff and at the least displeasure
quite capable of striking
his wife and two daughters
The elder girl finally left home
suffused with an anger that never abated
and a few years later,
I followed,
but I could not bear that my father
would never see either one of us again
so I visited from time to time.
Though we knew the worth of those visits
I remember cool, tenuous relations
with me trying to quell my fearful skin,
but it grew easier over the years
because I knew
each time I took my leave,
when my mother’s back was turned,
my father would thrust into my hand
a jar of honey for my long-absent sister,
“Och, take this,” he would say,
“I know she will be wanting it”.
1. TO MY HUNGRY CATS Rob Scott
It’s all there.
But if it isn’t
Well, then,
That’s all there is.
2. AND THAT
This all there is
This is all there
This is all
This is
This
That’s all there is for now!
A poem or a prayer . . . Carol Whitlow
A poem for police-people
And communities they care for
And children with cancer
And parents whose journalist son was beheaded
And refugees with no food or water
And farmers with no water
And cows who need water
And crops that need water
And those who are flooded or capsized or drowning
In sorrows and debts and don’t forget
Disease with no cure
And death
When it comes
May we have the courage to face the life
That is still here
Needing water of hope and
Farmers who care
Needing people and police and journalists and governments who
Care for the people of the land
And who care for the land
If we are to survive.
Nothing is Simple Anymore Barbara Regenspan
Can I breathe it away?
Was Iyengar right?
Inhale to the shoulder blade joint?
When the pain goes, the trouble goes?
First Breath—then Extension—then Space—
Precision—Truth—and finally—God?
Ann Douglas was dying of alcoholism
when she wrote of the girls who abandoned Marx
for medical men and preachers.
After recovery, when she finally took on the academy,
she did it in Vogue! “You can talk about kinky stuff
up there, but not God,” she wrote.
I kid you not; it was the issue that featured the comeback of red—
Avoiding writing, I tried on lipstick at Boscov’s.
Now searching for the facts and God—wondering what’s worth practice—
I wish red lipstick still held allure.
SEPT 3:
SELF IN REVERIE Daphne Sola
A long reach to the mirror of self
even with effort
it’s almost out of grasp
or we would wish it so
and a long walk to the pool
of terrifying clarity
where we might look down
and view an un-rippled reflection.
We see and do not see, hampered,
with one blind eye
but learn to live with doubt
and wavering outlines.
As the mirror tips over and sinks in the pool
in comfort can we turn away.
With only a fleeting time
it’s touch-and-go
a snatched-at feint for me say,
`We don’t need it.
Let it drown!’
Surely the gods would have it so’.
Night Reading Susan Eschbach
Girl Waits with Gun
Queer Heroes
Eloquent Rage
Everything Geography
Unapologetic
I browse the first five,
a pile of thirty, tilting
all wait to join in the read
a delight of anticipation
that first page turn
breathe and dive
wondering what I will already love
in the first lines
How do I lean across and
pluck one
Eyes closed?
an internal review of
energy
focus
interest
attitude
check
This evening
I choose the largest font.
Sin Título III Santiago Rodriguez
No tengo un boleto de avión que me lleve lejos,
o de tren, barco, o autobús.
Tampoco un lugar a dónde ir.
Ni nada que hacer cuando llegue.
Pero sí que quiero ir.
Quién sabe a dónde...
Emily’s Room Fran Markover
It’s simpler than I pictured, her writing desk
smaller than expected. I imagine the comfort
she felt with the familiar as she looked out of
her window: the hay fields of Amherst, bells
resounding from the nearby chapel. The older
I become, the more I understand Emily’s
isolation, the quietude─ her failing eyesight,
deaths of friends, mother’s illness, civil wars
that beset country and loved ones. She must
have treasured companionship from books
and bright petals. From her plain wood chair,
she witnessed a world from a window’s pane,
reading her lawns for birds and wild herbs
as if perusing pages of Thoreau, emulating his
wanderings with each pen stroke. She called
her writings: singing. I conjure this: a typical
afternoon, the poet dressed all in white, her
dog, lone audience, as she recites first drafts.
She postures herself as chorister attuned to
discord and harmony, awe of the ordinary:
neighbor robin with his hapless worm, a choir
of spring peepers, sunlight on wild violets,
her back yard, her blank pages becoming full
of sacred pauses, of unexpected dashes.
CURRIED Susan Weitz
Ripples of heat,
undulant, unsettling,
seized me today,
independent of the weather:
invaders from the south,
visitors from a volatile planet
or a pepper plant.
In the kitchen I diced chilies,
immersed mustard seeds
in searing oil;
mixed the C spices--
coriander, cumin, curry leaf--
and simmered split peas until,
between warmth in and warmth out,
an equilibrium settled,
a sunset,
a deep and yogic breath.
When the repairman arrived,
inhaling with his eyebrows,
he fanned his face.
Let us Learn (for Katy). Carol Whitlow
Let the children master their miniature worlds
Let each toy teach the child
How to play with grace and joy
Let the children learn
Let each book reach into an imaginary world
Let the light of ideas burn bright
Let the young person reach up
Feet on the ground head in the clouds
Let the children learn
Let life shout in joy
Let life wail in sorrow
Let the parents and the children
Comfort one another
Let us learn how
Let us learn how to fix the broken toys
Let us help repair the broken hearts
Let us light-en dark days
Let us find words that comfort
Let us find silence that heals
Let us give and receive grace.
as memory is a memory stick David Regenspan
or joy is from subscriptions made
or truth is from a Facebook page
--long enough and just so long
will honesty please the talking heads
and nourishment come from plastic bags.
as mothers suckle metal babes
and children learn from silicon chips
and tigers hunt a parking space
--long enough and just so long
will love a coffee filter fill
and hunger eat a cigarette.
Voices Joanna Green
It’s time to find
To reimagine voice
What is it what is possible
In these times in any times
To motivate uplift create inspire
What can be spoken what
Can be heard what happens in the
Twixt and tween to
Move minds and
Mountains
Bellowing fear rapes the quiet morning
What good is my voice among thundering lies
That terrorize deceive discourage kill
I cannot instruct cajole command
Only ask for help: We are our higher power
Do you remember
The Whos Down in Whoville
Joined hands across their tiny land
Lifted a thousand voices up
As one
#3 Emily Tells Me…
by
Martin Bidney
“I adored the cute squirrels you cleverly showed –
Now it’s time we were hitting the road!
I’ve a super-sabbatical here, as you’ve heard,
And it’s heaven, I give you my word.
If Lavinia weren’t such a wonderful cook,
I would really not know where to look.
And when watching dear Austin and Mabel cavort
I’ve been taught a great deal about sport!
When that Higginson – Wentworth – whatever the name –
Went away, quite a triumph I’d claim.
Just a bump on a log – or a spot on a wall –
Little spring did he feel in the fall.
You’re more fun, though, by far; you decidedly are –
Shall we harness our fate to a star?”
New Hope for Cannibalism Barbara Regenspan
Look, Saturn already ate his son, so don’t act like you haven’t mused on it. Me, I’ve got my own command center to enter—people whose power I want to sour, leaders whose demands I want remanded to a certain deserving source to change the course through tour de force without remorse the creation of new resource all spun of jealousy; hell it’s like a spell foretold thee.
All it requires is to hold a space in between an open-ness to new taste and a willingness to waste what can’t be digested. Get them all to let go. Then hold on with nuance, open to truants from the rules made by old fools. It’s time for the new insane to play their game. Barron, I’ve heard an old man’s flesh tastes like chicken.
SEPT 2:
SLOW Fran Markover
NO WAKE
The weathered sign reminds me─ slow my pace. After all,
it’s Sunday dawn and the cathedral of tree tops gives shelter.
Minus the walkers, bicyclists, skateboarders, it’s quiet.
Even the seagulls sleep, lined on the pier─ a feathery fence.
Cicadas serenade: trills like clock-ticks. I loop around Cayuga
Inlet, its still pristine waters, grateful for this parkland once
harvested by the Haudenosaunee. I imagine they gathered
by these quaking aspens under Full Sturgeon Moon. Imagine
they mourned late summer leaves, dying heart shapes that
blanketed yellowed fields. What festivals honored hawks,
turtles, wolves? Today the lone osprey mother flies in and
out of her light pole nest, feeding the fledglings. And above
sun-parched milkweed, a monarch closes and opens her wings
as if she lets out August heat for flight southward. I rest
on a bench, partake in the only ceremony I can conjure:
closing my eyes, giving thanks for the weeping willows. I offer
prayers for the lost: mink, muskrat, a bald eagle’s swoop, all
the beaver lodges, their dams.
IN SUMMER . . . Daphne Sola
I had the habit of wading into the pond
to deal with the algae,
a pond we had dug out of a swamp,
that was resistantly shallow
with bedrock at only three feet
which encouraged the growth of weeds
and plumed grasses.
It was, in my eyes, a ring of green
which other people called algae
but I knew they were wrong
it was not rot, it was renewal
and there was no convincing them
that when I stepped in and down
it was not slimy,
what surrounded me up to my knees
were green plants
an exuberance of nature
seizing every opportunity
to leap into life.
It was tough going as I pushed forward
and finally threw my gatherings
up on the banks
and my children never shared my enthusiasm
for this soaking-wet clean-up.
They would bemoan,
`Where’s mom? Is she in the pond again?’
I’ll admit I probably did not look my best
in my mud-streaked, tendrilled cut-offs
but when the UPS man caught me
in pond-clearing mode
their humiliation was complete
My beloved chore was enhanced, however,
when a wisehead farmer told me
that I had done only half the job,
I should gather up the dried detritus
and handily use it as fertilizer.
In this new learning game
I did not hesitate to follow his advice.
FINCHES Susan Weitz
The finches like to gather
before, or after, dark,
their appetites atwitter
while crows on treetops bark.
Admire the crows in theory,
intelligent and sleek,
cooperatively raiding
the feeders of the meek.
Through winter they’ll be with us,
black feathers on white snow.
Many a humble haiku
sings portraits of the crow.
And so would I, if I were young
but years, like finches, flown
have wed me to ephemera:
the swift, the sweet, the gone.
Cleaning Rob Scott
I see the smudge of mud
On the outside of the kitchen
Window above the sink.
It has been there for days.
Even the rain can’t wash it away.
I notice it when I do
The dishes. Especially when
I do the dishes! Running the
Tap water until it’s nice and hot.
I take off my watch and put it on
The shelf. I sink my hands into the water
And rest them on the bottom
For a few minutes
In a deep sudsy sea.
While the rest of me stays
Good and dry. When I am done,
I leave room for my fixation
On writing this early poem for people who love me Joanna Green
and will forgive its imperfection I hope
Put that thing down! I tell myself
Again. Times up for bad news, weather,
Email, all manner of rabbithole.
Pressing the two buttons resolutely, a little sadly,
I power off. Look up from my writing chair across
The terrace. Feel the September breeze
Still soft and warm.
I feel the pressure of your eyes on my halting fingers.
I tell them... just go on.
The pen scratches. The squirrel
Chides me from the maple tree.
Scolds? Or is “Chivvies” the better word?
I pick up my phone to look it up.
Blank, it cannot help me.
One hundred days David Regenspan
You still live as a body
From a body,
Eating only what flows
From your mother’s breasts,
Seeing only what goes on
Right before your eyes.
You do not know
You from not-you,
Whether your toes are yours
Or your mother’s
Or the world’s.
You can lie alone only so long
Before you cry out to be held
Because you do not trust your body,
Do not know of its substance.
Your Chinese grandparents celebrate
Your one hundredth day
As a beginning of:
Seeing, smelling, smiling.
But the hundred days are also an ending
Of womb yet not-womb,
Body yet not-body,
Arms and legs
That belong to no one in particular.
This time soon to go
And never come again
Except perhaps in the moment before death,
Maybe one hundred years from now,
When the infant comes
To call you home.
Fountain of Youth by Carol Whitlow
Remember Ponce de Leon?
Such youthful vitality
To travel so far
To find adventure
In pursuit of his own immortality.
Didn’t they all find it
In a country where they could survive and live on
Through generations . . .
Here he is alive in me
400 years later.
I get it –
That desire to wake up
Each day and feel alive
And surprised by
A New World
I look for it each day
And often discover it
In the most familiar places.
Sonnet on Saving a Chair Barbara Regenspan
When that millipede waddled
towards the nicked plate
of glossy blue paint on the porch,
I—planning to restore
historic beauty to the spindled chair
rescued from the trash pile on Tioga—
thought of us souls seeking refuge
in this season of disturbed balance.
As my leggy diplopoda swerved from the thick
midnight lake—conjuring toddlers whose
flashed grins predict tumble—
I recalled that death, too, can hold
promise—while my eye caught the blue tip
of the one thousandth leg.
#2 Speeding Up
by
Martin Bidney
Emily Dickinson galloped along;
Smiling and glad, she was singing a song:
“Staying inside is so dull. What I need
Has to be travel, with plenty of speed!
Sitting around, and with nothing to do?
What good is that? Take a traveler’s view!
Ribbon and hat – how they flutter and gleam!
Rapidly prancing – a traveler’s dream!
Poetry comes and I’m loving the sound! –
Look at how fast we can cover the ground!”
Emily shouts, and she’s laughing out loud:
“Poetry’s fun! I can write it! I’m proud!”
Emily Dickinson, Emily D.,
You are the poet forever, for me!
Now Susan Eschbach
The sun,
warm on my ear
like a slow kiss in
chill air,
cuts it’s autumn angle
through
cold blue sky
to burn
the poplars golden,
like a child with a
lens
angles the sun
to burn
the page.
SEPT 1:
AN ERASURE POEM * Rob Scott
My Version
Call It Love, Spring Madness
Chance encounter,
Observe willows,
Pansies on a street.
Let this in,
Strong, persistent root.
Name the first
Wind that caressed
Unshared kisses.
Call the earth
Bursting too long,
Trembling for the plough.
Blood chant
Anthems to arrival,
Our lips silent,
Uncommitted.
Without Name
By Pauli Murray
Call it neither love nor spring madness,
Nor chance encounter nor quest ended,
Observe it casually as pussy willows
Or pushcart pansies on a city street.
Let this seed growing in us
Granite-strong with persistent root
Be without name, or call it the first
Warm wind that caressed your cheek
And traded unshared kisses between us.
Call it the elemental earth
Bursting the clasp of too-long winter
And trembling for the plough-blade.
Let our blood chant it
And our flesh sing anthems to its arrival,
But our lips shall be silent, uncommitted.
Wait! Susan Eschbach
Today’s the promise
30 days and 30 poems?
Eventually I send a dove
seeking prose?
Now I make public
these nightly
insights of soul?
What, Noah, was I thinking?
Well, refugees, for one
safety, sanctuary
two by two if possible, let’s
get everyone to dry land
Our words a
singular plank
in our collective bridge
Six Mile Creek David Regenspan
I picked a rock from Six Mile Creek, brown siltstone
Like all the other rocks, as dull as mud.
I guess I liked the feel of it: a size
To serve as weapon or as paperweight,
Or a rough-skinned token of my belonging
To water, tree and fish, chipmunk and hawk.
Something told me to drop the rock. It slapped
Against a larger stone and broke in two.
There, inside a half, a clam lay open
To sunlight after many million years.
I held it to my eye; it was delicate,
Ribbed like a fan held by a dancer. I
Had broken time open, disturbed an ancient sea,
Uncovered a vanished beauty. Was it now my right
To place it on a shelf, congratulate
Myself, claim I owned it? Or should I
Place it among the other stones of the creek,
Pretend I did not see a crack in time.
Confirmation Carol Whitlow
How can I leave
When the ghosts of my past
Are in the bones of the house
And the roots of the trees?
They surround me and infuse me
With comfort and confirmation.
Did I not bear you and care for you
And you now for me?
Who will know me if I go?
O to have a home
To be a woman of the kitchen and the garden
To hang the sheets flapping in the wild breeze
To push the swing and swing the cradle and sing the day
To enfold the night around all that is home and is loved
To love the arrivals and the departures
How could I ever leave this place of the essence of life itself?
Of sanctification?
How could I find comfort in a facsimile?
MUDLILY Susan Weitz
Why do our mothers
grasp our elbows
yanking our small and
yearning selves
from the ecstatic muck
of the marsh
where mottled frogs give
cigar-box banjo serenades
against the squish and
plop
of bottom-feeding flatfish?
What being, living close
to the grass
as children do
could be obedient as a hound
without first sniffing the
youthful grass
or caressing
the divine squelch,
the universe
that is,
in this moment,
mud?
WHAT DAILY I READ . . . Daphne Sola
in the newspapers
makes my mood . . .
in English, `heavy',
in Spanish, `pesado',
there's no escape
both words pull me down
I sense weight without worth
so I turn for comfort
to James Joyce’s Dubliners
and join them at the bar,
their brogued feet on the ground
voices thick with wit,
where, in fashion
both cavalier and respectful
they discuss church and priests,
which, after all,
are the center of life,
their life, at any rate.
I lift my glass, . . .
I’ll have whatever you’re having, . . .
and already my spirits
are headed for the moon.
Sin título Santiago Rodriguez
Mi abuelito está cansado y débil.
Pienso en todas las cosas horribles que el tiempo nos hace.
Fluye incontrolable: rápido lento.
Poem a Day Project #1: Introduction to Poetry
Martin Bidney
Two squirrels playing tag – they made me smile.
The course of nature is a force of play!
I thank you, squirrel-kids! My gift today
Was perfect joy in watching you awhile.
And ONE, and TWO, and THREE, and FOUR, and FIVE.
You like the way the poet beats the drum?
More marvel-happy times are coming from
The chanting. Beating heart – you are ALIVE!
And listen to the beauty of the rhymes:
They always guarantee the best of times.
The sky is gray. Prefer to turn it blue?
Behold! we did it – color coming through!
Dear Poetry – I’m loving you so much,
I’m liking every key my fingers touch!
In the Garden with Emily Dickinson
Fran Markover
We wander, two poets, on fragrant paths.
She rustles like a flower, ruffled piqué,
upswept ribbons, white bonnet, whispers
cherry pie to the heliotrope she pinches.
I thank her for baby’s breath and hyacinth
in the nosegay, her note after my brother’s
funeral, unable are the loved to die. Ask─
how one ever writes well of hope or death.
Emily sighs, tugs a dandelion from yarrow
for the herbarium, points toward a hickory,
an orange flash almost hidden in boughs─
a 4:30 caroler, the oriole who sings before
neighbors awaken, sings, when morning’s
light reveals poet, early bird, inflorescence.
Isaias, 8-4-20 Joanna Green
“God is my salvation” pours
A steady rain this August day
Soaking the parched ground.
The crisping lawns sigh,
The worms in their multitudes
Arise to give thanks and
Feed robins.
The roots of all things
Sing Halleluya.
How thankless to slide
Into grief on such a day.
To fall from summer’s sunny grace,
To lie listless and congealed,
Pressed under suffocating waters
Inside and out.
Breathing through a narrow tube
Feeling my way along dark passages,
So familiar, almost
Comforting.
When it’s over we breathe deeply.
The garden is lit with cucumbers and weeds.
A sistreline shimmer of crickets
Glazes the air.
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT Yvonne Fisher
Vote like your life depends on it
Vote like you are saving your mother’s life
Vote like it is a sacrament
Vote like it matters deeply
Vote like you can’t stomach four more years
Vote like you are saving Democracy
Vote like you care about crimes against humanity
Vote for all those who died unnecessarily from Corona Virus
Vote like you must free children in detention camps
Vote like Black Lives Matter
Vote like Latino/a lives matter
Vote like Indigenous lives matter
Vote like the environment matters
Vote like you are saving the earth
Vote like there’s a dictator perched around the corner
Vote like you can’t stand unmarked armed federal troops in your streets
Vote like you are getting tear gassed
Vote like you can’t breathe
Vote like there is a knee on your neck
Vote like you can’t stand the treason and corruption
Vote to dismantle white supremacy
Vote like you envision a better world to come
Vote like the idiocracy must end
Vote like you want healthcare for everyone
Vote like: man woman person camera TV buffoonery must stop
Vote for disability rights
Vote for women
Vote for Queer rights, Trans rights
Vote for working people’s rights
Vote to end poverty, Vote for the poor
Vote to save seniors, the Elders, the Elders
Vote like you’re trying to save the Post Office
Vote like you’re trying to save Democracy
Vote for the endangered species
Vote for all the suffering animals
Vote like you are endangered too
Vote for wetlands, oceans, lakes
Vote for Yosemite and all State and National parks
Vote like 150,000 people are dying unnecessarily
Vote like you want the government to have a plan
Vote like you are powerful
Vote like it’s an honor
Vote like your vote counts
Vote like we must defeat him
Vote like lives depend on you
Vote like it’s your duty
Vote like your soul is leading the way
Vote like we are creating a whole new country
Vote like the whole world is watching
Vote like it really matters
Vote like it’s life or death
Vote like it’s for your children
Vote like you want the good guys to win
Vote like we’re all depending on you
Vote to begin a new day
Don’t let them suppress you
Don’t let them disenfranchise you
Vote early, vote absentee, vote by mail
Stand in line if you must, keep going
Vote however you can, you are not alone
Reach out for help, vote together, vote from your heart
Vote like you are the Sun, vote like you are the light
Vote for your future, vote for your children
Vote for 7 generations,
Vote for us all
Vote.
Message on a Wall Barbara Regenspan
This morning the light brought company—
a stripey, rollicking thing invading the
floor and spackling one wall with braille
while I considered your invitation
to something that leaped over blindness—
bringing attention to the unseen.
Help me in this time of need where
basic wants eclipse this poet’s
longing—where revelation is shamed
against the can of beans nobody wants
anyway, where impending chaos dwarfs
the certain chorus naming what is basic.
