Vox Populi
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Michael Simms: Last Testaments
Second to Last Testament
Since I never cared about anything
but love and beauty,
you can do whatever you want
with this brittle husk when I’m done with it.
Let the body find its own bright scattering.
Toss my ashes into the wind
for all I care, let them drift
into the Mon Valley
to mix with the unpretentious love
of the parishioners
at St. John the Baptist Ukrainian Catholic Church
straight down the mountain from us
where old women stuff pierogies
to repair the golden onion on the roof
and raise money for the orphanage
in their hometown of Vorzel outside Kiev
bombed last month. Every Wednesday
they fill over three thousand pierogies,
bag them by the dozen, grab their mops and pails
and scrub the granite floor beside the sacristy
until the priest is walking on light
~~~
I’ll Wait For You
I’ll row to the far shore
and when night descends I’ll enter the city
and walk the streets of your absence
find the small cafe we’ve always known
where people are waiting as I am waiting
reading a book you love
A thin man with a thin beard
is playing guitar and singing of a grove
where he lived with a quiet heart
All night I’ll wait for you
sipping the darkness of his voice
and at dawn you’ll arrive
having thrown your luggage in the River Styx
and we’ll drink from the silver cup of day
~~~~
Poems copyright 2025 Michael Simms. From Jubal Rising (Ragged Sky, 2025). Second to Last Testament first published in Verse Virtual.
Michael Simms is the founder and editor of Vox Populi. His publications include poetry, essays and speculative novels. He and his wife Eva live in the historic neighborhood of Mount Washington. In 2011 the State Legislature of Pennsylvania awarded Simms a Certificate of Recognition for his service to the arts.
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”and we’ll drink from the silver cup of day.” Such a gorgeous, evocative ending. I really admire these poems!
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Oh my, I’ve just come back to Vox Populi and am met with these brilliant poems of yours Michael, love and beauty in every line. And the responses are a clear message that these are poems we each need to read. A deep bow to you.
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Thank you, Jan. Welcome back!
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Michael,
The line, “reading a book you love,” is a fresh surprise.
I l ike your poem’s tenderness!
Write on,
Miriam
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Thank you, Miriam. Love your poems too.
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💙✨💙 TOUCHED MY HEART AND SOUL.
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Thank you!
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Lovely, lovely, Michael. How often I am restored by poetry!
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Thank you so much, Lisa. I love your poems, so I’m thrilled by your praise.
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Wow, eek gods, Michael. These just blew me away. Amazing work.
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Oh, thank you, Michelle. Your poems are so intuitively right… I’m honored by your praise.
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seriously: xoxoxoxo
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Wonderful. From a new book! I will be reading all the poems.
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Thanks, Stephanie!
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I sense a touch of Gerald Stern in your two poems, especially the first one. A beautiful telling of the labor of love in making pierogies to stave off despair.
I told my dying wife Pam, on her death bed, about crossing the river Styx. She was unable to speak, seemed unconscious, but when I came to telling her I would only cross later, but would wave to her from this side every chance I could, she groaned, she had heard. But I will never know on this shoreline, whether what I said was right for her to hear or not. Had I had your poem I’ll Wait for You in hand, I would have read it to her, instead. A beautiful crossing of the boundaries of life and death. AI cannot match your poems
For some reason, I think of you as the rambling rover of poetry.
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What a beautiful response, Jim. I’m honored to be included in your prose elegy here.
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Thank you for your poems, as well as your editorship and curation of such wonderful poets and commentators. You are the renaissance person in a specialist/niche world.
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Thank you for your generous praise, Jim. I wish we were in a renaissance. I fear we are entering a dark age.
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nice poems from observant poet.
i can hear and sea Neruda’s love poems . By the way i like to refer to him as Pablo only. The same is for Hemingway. I would call him Mr. Ernest.
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Thanks, Saleh. I think Pablo and Ernest would like that.
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Emozionata…. Sento sulla mia pelle le vibrazioni della tua anima.
Grazie per queste tue splendide poesie.
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Grazie, amica mia. Le poesie non sono mie, ma mi sono state affidate.
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The emotions remain the same, thank you.
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Love is endlessly adaptive and versatile, and you’ve captured this in both poems, Michael–from the miracle of devotion that results in the first poem’s final stunning line, to the way the poet crawls into his lover’s mind and heart by reading a book they’ve shared. Thank you.
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Thank you, my brilliant friend. I’m honored.
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Oh, the pierogies! I love these two poems, Michael.
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Thanks, Deborah!
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Bathing in the beauty of these poems this morning. I would say they are my favorites of yours but I do not know if I am reading them for the first time again. There is a positive to ground hog day brain. That catch of breath usually only happens once. Thank you.
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Thank you, Barbara, for the many gifts you give to our community.
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How good to read these poems again, Michael, from your Jubal Rising! * I’m glad you offered those two stirring, wise & universal poems to us — the morning after the Day of the Dead celebrations. I love how your poems invite us all to remember every day to continue — no matter what — to care deeply for “love and beauty.” For they are to be found, always, always somewhere around us, and must be celebrated in our writings. That, too, is an aspect of resistance. No matter how difficult some may find it.
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Laure-Anne, you are my guide star.
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This feeling crept into THE BLESSED ISLE a bit, didn’t it? Just beautiful. I think you were working on these two things around the same time, perhaps?
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Yes, I was. Good call. The novel and the poems are both about the journey after death. The poems came first, then the novel.
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I really admired both poems and especially loved that surprising and wonderful turn in “Second to Last Testament” when your ashes drift into the Mon Valley and suddenly this poem that starts out locally takes in Ukraine so tenderly and particularly and with the restraint that makes a poem more moving rather than less.
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Thanks, Maestro.
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The elegiac tone strongly sounds in both poems. I love (and appreciate on a craft level) how Simms touches on loss that extends from his personal and deeply known geography (love the photo, too!) that extends to Ukraine and back to Bible and myth. Filling pierogies is vital work in a Simm’s poem; this poet also knows how to row and sing.
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Thanks, Adam.
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I felt both poems. Especially the first. It made me think of my mom and her war. She lived in a village west of Lviv. It was a part of Poland then.
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Thanks, John. That part of the world has had devastating wars for a very long time. My heart goes out to the Ukrainians, especially the children. A friend and former student of my wife’s is living in a shelter in Poland with her children while her husband is fighting somewhere on the Russian front. My wife’s parents survived the British bombing of the Siegerland when they were children. Despite my tendency to complain, I’ve had a very soft life compared to theirs.
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here’s a newspaper column I wrote about the Ukraine war 3 years ago:
Like you, I’m tired of hearing about Putin’s war against Ukraine. It started three months ago on Monday, February 21, and everyone was sure that it would be over within a few days. Russia seemed unstoppable, a major world power with unlimited ability to destroy and kill, and Ukraine seemed ill-prepared and in a daze. We all expected the war to be over by that weekend.
But the war didn’t stop, and there doesn’t seem any sign that it will stop any time soon.
Everyday, I open the paper and turn on the news and go on social media, and I hear about the Russian forces advancing here and pulling back there. I hear about the Ukrainians doing the unbelievable, standing up to the Russians and pushing them back slowly to the borders of their country. I hear about the Polish government issuing a 36-page guide telling Poles how they should prepare for a possible invasion of Poland and – what’s worse – a possible nuclear attack.
And I hear more than that. I hear the news that I don’t want to hear. I hear about the misery this war has caused for the Ukrainians.
I hear about the buildings destroyed in Lviv and Mariupol and Kyiv and little towns no one outside of Ukraine has ever heard of. I see footage of mothers carrying their babies through the rubble of destroyed streets, of grandmothers sitting in those streets weeping, of fathers pushing their struggling children into buses that will hopefully save them by taking them to Katowice or Lublin.
I hear all of this, and I wonder what the people of Russia are thinking. Are they being lied to by their government? Are they being told there is no war? That the Russian soldiers in Ukraine are simply on an extended picnic, and they will be back in their home towns before the first rose blooms this summer. Or do the Russian people know the truth that there nation is a nation of murderers and rapist and killers of children and their moms and dads and grandparents.
And I know that this war will not end even when it ends.
For those that have been in a war, suffered its brutality, endured its grief or succumbed to that grief, war does not end.
I know this because I saw it in my parents. They were teenagers when the Germans invaded Poland and did the terrible things to the country and to my mother and father that they did, brutalizing and killing their families and sending them to the slave labor camps in Germany.
My parents lived with these memories of the war all their lives. There was never a day that they didn’t carry the psychological wounds of the war with them. Fifty years after the war, the pain of the terrible things they experienced and saw was still with them.
And it will be like this for the Ukrainians and for those of us watching this war.
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Thank you for this, John.
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How moving to (re-) encounter these wonders, Mike, especially “Second to Last Testament.”
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Thanks, Syd!
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Oh God Michael!
These poems are excruciatingly good! Wowser! We’ve just driven this early morning to Delray to the Public Library off the harrowing interstate to read with 20 other poets from an Anthology we’re all in—its a poetry morning, out of the usual for us, that first begins now we’ve arrived with time to read these two excellent poems. I believe we’re headed toward Nirvana, and you have pointed the way. The “silver cup” is in my hands!
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We’ll meet at the river, Sean.
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Would you kindly include me in this one, please?
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Sean and I will meet you at the river, Laure-Anne.
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These are the beautiful and thought-provoking poems that need a second reading. The grant view of Pittsburgh is surely complementary and complimentary.
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John, I admire you so much!
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Beautiful, beautiful poems!
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Thank you, Christine. I love your poems as well.
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These are wonderful, Michael. Second to Last Testament resonates with my feelings about death and what to do with the body that’s left.
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Thank you, Jan. Your support through the years has meant so much to me.
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Gorgeous poems Michael❤️ thanks for writing them !Jane Mc
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Thank you, Jane. I admire your work as well.
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Nice Michael, really nice work!“Since I never cared about anything but love and beauty,” is wh
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Thanks, Steve!
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I love these!
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Thanks, Kathryn. Are you living as an expat now?
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Yes. Too complex to describe here.
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got it.
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