Kate Daniels: The Poem
Niobe had just lost her son.
To help herself, she read a poem
to those assembled in the funeral home
Chard deNiord: See How Brightly The Leaves Fall With Grief
How long then short the days grow across the Earth.
Bhikshuni Vasetthi: Oh, My Heart
I called out to my grief and drew it toward me.
I held my grief and gently rocked it.
Shh, I said. There, there. There, there.
Larry Levis | At the Grave of My Guardian Angel: St. Louis Cemetery, New Orleans
And without beauty, Bakunin will go on making his forlorn & unreliable little bombs in the cold, & Oswald will adjust
The lenses on the scope of his rifle, the one
Friend he has carried with him all the way out of his childhood,
The silent wood of its stock as musical to him in its grain as any violin.
Michelle Bitting: Now at Holiday Time I Think About the Moment I Heard You Passed On
a stone’s throw from lots
where talented Sharon Tate expired and Jim Morrison
fluttered psychedelic, fiery birds rising from the boulevard
of broken wings
Michael Simms: The Pecan Grove
he taught me
the geometry of carpentry
the mysteries
of plumbing, told me
dirty jokes
Peter Makuck: Tiger Swallowtails
clusters of fluttering wings
yellow with black stripes
in and out
of the white and orange lantana
Wayne Karlin: Butch in Autumn
Run ahead again,
old friend,
I’ll catch up with you later.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Earbug
Ah, it’s back. It hadn’t hummed in my head for years —
that achingly joyful accordion tango.