Days 16-17
Welcome to Day 17 of the fundraiser! Here's our latest great batch of poems:
SEPT 17
Rob Scott
Spider Lessons David Regenspan
The spider that lives on my porch,
legs banded with yellow stripes, back checkered like a tiny tablecloth
Each night takes up its post in the center of its web
To tell me one thing: live in the world.
Find the center, wait, find the center, wait.
When something comes in, wrap it carefully.
Taste it slowly. Leave the web to sleep. Wake.
Then find the center, wait.
Fly, moth, word
Find the center
Wait.
Rites FRAN MARKOVER
My husband Ron studies the latest road kill,
the big coon who climbed the cherry tree.
I watch from the window. Ron grabs a shovel,
lifts the newly dead animal from Rt. 79,
places him on grass so the body won’t get crushed.
He shoos away flies by the head,
talks to the raccoon. I hear “beautiful markings”─
the way I heard him whisper messages
to a mouse trembling in the cellar,
the way he murmured to remains of a feral cat
before digging a grave, shrouding it
with pine needles. He continues to speak
to the raccoon, cold wind ruffling its fur.
FIRELIGHT Susan Weitz
How indecent is it
to be out admiring
the cedar’s exclamatory
arms, or,
during the woodpecker’s staccato
suet feast,
to casually count
white blurs on
black wings.
How callous to love
the cloud-blotted sky,
or revel in a hesitant wind,
admire the chipmunk’s
gymnastic quest for seeds.
To wince at the nuthatch screech,
to woo the two-stepping finch
who sidles nearer.
Louder than the crow,
my neighbor is mowing his lawn
while the West Coast burns.
EDDIE Joanna Green
Eddie calls but I can’t pick up.
“Sorry I can’t come to the phone right now” Siri tells him.
Squinting at his phone, he sighs wondering if
He’s pissed me off, if I’m tired of him,
His sorry life, his bad teeth,
All the trips to the food pantry,
The time he sat at my kitchen table,
After we drove around all afternoon, and
Tried to tell me what happened to him
When he was a little boy, but couldn’t,
And I just told him “You’re a good man, Eddie,"
And he cried like a baby.
Later I call him back.
“I just wanted to say hi,”
He tells me. I tell him about the beach
And when I’ll be back.
“I just missed you,” he says.
“I miss you too Eddie,” I tell him.
And I mean it.
ODE TO THE WORM Daphne Sola
The lowly worm
he does not ask
but goes about
his earthly task
tilling soil
and tilling flesh
from nymph to ass
it is not death
but tunneled mass
that draws new breath.
The worm has stirred up
pearls of air
and set his sights
\ on heaven’s stair
that climbs
towards immortality
from soil to seed
to leaf to tree.
What Captive Flowers Model Barbara Regenspan
Not birds or butterflies, but captive flowers
enhance my journal burst on aging—
making no apologies
for stark contrast of slime and dryness.
They drop parts,
leave powdery residues, often yellow,
short pointy petals gnarled to gray,
steely buds without hope of renewal,
unconscious of the losses:
color range, softness,
ligature, temperance.
EMILY IN AUTUMN Susan Weitz
Emily, you’re haunting me.
Had you waited for darkness, I could
pretend you were a dream
but here, in suburbia,
with autumn issuing its
red-gold threats,
and unfamiliar parting squawks,
I hear your clipped, provincial
Amherst accent intoning,
‘These are the days
when birds come back—‘
Suddenly you and I are
gripping the cool boughs
with our yellow claws,
you, a chickadee in a modest cap
and white collar; I, a mourning dove,
haunting the backyards
with my burbly trill.
What glory in the trees,
conceding everything to the wind.
Even the dying branches
manage grace,
still clasping their final leaves
while purpled apples
acquiesce and fall.
What verbs will we borrow
to carry us southward,
what nouns must we munch
to lift and tilt our wings?
And how will we describe the odyssey
through flocks of words, or birds--
dipping our beaks
in Lethe’s freezing waters--
to that Florida of poets,
Immortality?
Allen and Me Joanna Green
It’s time to talk about our relationship, Allen Ginsberg. To be frank, I never liked you. I resent people who confuse me, make me feel stupid. To be fair, though, I never read you, after trying hard to comprehend that really famous one – what was it called? and failing. Maybe I was repulsed by your soft slovenly body, your rampant hairiness. Or was that Jerry Garcia? I get you two mixed up. Not that I was prim. An awkward young hippie, defying my high school dress code with a purple skirt down to my ankles, or a long tail sewed on to my bell bottoms. I was certainly not “straight,” as we called the kids who abstained from mind altering medicines. I traveled with gusto and often terror to the same strange lands that Jerry did. And did you too, Allen? I never cared to ask. Perhaps we’ve met before, after all, in the far countries of confusion? Forgive my rudeness, then. I will take another look at your poems. Maybe you will remind me how to love dumb wonder, the rush of not understanding, the grasping of the mind for anchor, the joyous surrender.
IN THE NEW AGE Daphne Sola
Tread lightly
Echoes of your footsteps
Travel instantly round the world.
Stand immobile
Faceless watchers wait for you
To turn your head
And with lightning speed
Record your presence
With tiny eyeglass cameras.
Beware of crowds
Full of infection
Where Young Turks stand
Shoulder-to-shoulder with Infidels
And God-fearers rub elbows
With Scoff-laws.
It's a new age
In which conundrums abound,
If you weep at all
Weep for Reason,
Weep for Love,
They have been sent away
And put behind bars.
The Arithmetic of Tired Susan Eschbach
It has only been
2 days
of virtual school
82 days
of planning
what-ifs , that change daily
so make that
164
and 5 months, do the math
of no children
our whole purpose and
passion
106 ipads to our smallest
humans
oh yeah, and chromebooks
Apple and Google profits soar
viral cost uncountable
losses for all of us are
eating out the marrow
iron rich oxygenated bone mass
sucked to brittle
the tasks and toil and tyranny
of these numbers
a trifecta of tired.
My neighbors asks
"Hey principal,
how's the start of school?"
Chitwan Road by Carol Mae Whitlow
A monolith rock sliding from the sky
To a Himalayan snowmelt river,
Clear water tumbling over huge boulders…
Jesus met Buddha along Chitwan Road,
Buddha from the East, Jesus from the West,
The dust covered their feet, their hair, their clothes.
The cold river refreshed their tired souls.
They talked of the sick and the strong,
The rich and the poor,
Love and forgiveness,
Compassion and grace.
And eternity.
As they travelled homeward, they carried with them the finest jewels,
And scattered them in the dust
Along Chitwan Road.
Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” and Moby-Dick:
A Fantasy by Martin Bidney
falling refrain, iambic tetrameter
/x x/ x/ x/
x/ x/ x/ x/
“I’D prefer NOT to,” Bartleby
Replied to all suggestions made.
The wisdom Melville meant, that he
In these few simple words conveyed
Comes through quite overwhelmingly
In Moby-Dick. The whale-oil trade
Gained naught from the insanity
That had the Captain’s brain waylaid.
Admire the scrivener portrayed:
“I’D prefer NOT to,” Bartleby
Replies to Ahab, who displayed
A grave fixation: “Slay, for me,
The whale that ate my leg! Afraid?”
He’s freudened into lunacy –
The crewmen will their lives have paid!
They all were taken in – but see:
Our scrivener, of madness free,
Refused the raptor-man who preyed.
“I’D prefer NOT to,” Bartleby
Replied, heart stalwart, undismayed.
I hear him, and my heart feels glee.
Return to shore! Your goods unlade!
For Captain, padded cell, pardee!
Smart Bartle’s fame will never fade.
Hackensack River DAVID REGENSPAN
When I was a child the Hackensack River was the edge of the world I knew; my town ended as its shore. It was poisoned, an oil stained home to half dead fish, turned on their sides and finning the water weakly. And yet I blithely played on the slopes above the river, sledding in winter, riding the playground swings and seesaw in summer.
Then someone had the idea of cleaning the Hackensack by the time I was old. There was even a nature sanctuary established on its shore, some of the river water enclosed in a pond where turtles sunned themselves on the rocks. The fish, healthy now, made their invisible way under the pearling gray surface.
It was an odd paradox for me: a dead river when I was first alive, a live river when I had traveled some decades closer to death. Now I am older still and have not been back to the river in a long time. It is a river of the mind, neither dead nor alive and not the border of anything.
Bullfrogs at Night Fran Markover
They sing, sometimes, in funky unison,
sometimes, an aria by the lead basso.
If it’s hot and humid─ I hear counter-
point, a cappella barbershop quartets
in nightly bullfrog competition.
Maybe they gripe about food or sex,
maybe about princess damselflies
who flirt with their glittering wings.
But now, it’s late and the concert
doesn’t seem to end─ I can only think
they perform Ol Sole Mio just for me
as I close my eyes, lonely, imagining
short, muscle-bound troubadours
love-sick under my screen, crooning
in something like Italian, as they strum
miniature banjos, jumping
for a glance of their Beloved, chances
for one more arrivederci.
Narcissism Barbara Regenspan
I had ideas that would solve everything
But they vanished to dreamworld—
Their resonance the image
Of what will never be.
