H.C. Palmer: An Old Kansas Farm Boy’s Take on Gary Snyder’s “Hay for the Horses” or Why I Became a Poet
In the early 1950s I worked summers as a part of a team of 4 high school football players bucking bales of alfalfa hay for a local rancher in Southeast Kansas. We moved over 1,000 bales from his hay meadow to the loft in his barn each cutting.
Frank O’Hara: Autobiographia Literaria
And here I am, the
center of all beauty!
writing these poems!
Imagine!
Barbara Crooker: For My Grandchildren
We sat on the porch swing in the fragrant dark
scented by roses and lilies, knowing we were
about to lose everything, but powerless to stop it.
Lawrence Wray: In Line at the Butcher
Papers blow and clot the gutters. The faces are those I’m used to from as long ago as Calabria, Donegal, and Kyiv. New arrivals are a year maybe from Juarez … Continue reading
Molly Fisk: Lapsed Unitarian in Mormon Country
Some bird
shat a mulberry seed whose skyward
reach is nine feet now at least
and equally wide, for perfect shade.
Robert Cording: Ghost Forest
Tonight, I’m not here
to pretend this place that has been lost,
can be saved, but simply to stand here,
at the edge of what once was
and remember the sound of wind in the pines
Jennifer L. Freed: Even in Unkind Times
I just saw her last summer, sat two rows behind her
on a folding chair. Stared at the knobs of spine
protruding from beneath her tied-back hair
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Like a Friend
I didn’t land. I fell and I fell and I fell.
At first as I plummeted, I feared the landing,
imagining an imminent crash. Then,
I fell through nights and middays. Fell through
kitchen floors and highways.
Ellen Foos: Letting Assisted Living Have a Say
We are both losing something.
I am losing him,
he is losing himself.
Thomas Lux: Ode to the Unbroken World, Which Is Coming
It must be coming, mustn’t it? Churches
and saloons are filled with decent humans.
A mother wants to feed her daughter,
fathers to buy their children things that break.
James Crews: After Receiving Bad News from a Friend
To offer what we can,
even when a friend lives far away,
to say: I will hold you inside myself
as you pass through this new gate.
Alison Hurwitz: V.A.S.T
An acronym for Variable Attention Sensory Trait
Helen Pletts: In the Presence of Things Flying Slower in a Grey Dusk (4 Poems in English and Chinese)
Rain from the Tang dynasty has re-surged,
all feelings gather in a fine mist, and lighter still is the joy of rain as a witness
to the landscape of fear fleeing like mist up the mountainside
Ma Yongbo: Responding to My Deceased Father’s Order at Night (English & Chinese)
At last, we arrive at the small town of Sifangtai,
only my father stands there,
at the crossroads shrouded in thin mist
