Daniel Burston: John Prine, Working Class Poet (1947-2020)
John Prine was a national treasure, whose songs about love, loss and aging – many written while he was still a relatively young man! – reflect his working class roots. But even so, they have a universal and timeless relevance.
Chard deNiord: Last Goodbye in the Time of Corona
The darkness arrived without your voice
or touch, my love, and yet I heard
your voice and felt your hand in mine.
Molly Fisk: Elegy (for Leah)
her infinite soprano
and my street drawl voicing words that could
depress a saint
Connie Post: How to Sort the Living from the Dead
Forget all the nonsense
about eyes opened or closed
or breathing
or brain waves
Sharon Fagan McDermott: Orchid Room, Phipps Conservatory
Grandma lived to be ninety-three
and wore the fabric of that tale to a soft sheen
with her retelling. Where does the past lie?
Sydney Lea: Passing the Arts and Crafts Fair
There aren’t many like him anymore, the handy, soft-spoken old ones, who still know how to farm, how to raise up a house you can live in, how to still-hunt a whitetail.
Louie Skipper: The Beginning
I keep trying to persuade my father
into a better opinion of me now that he is dead.
Edna St. Vincent Millay: Dirge without Music
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind…
Miriam Levine: Candlewood
We go into the dark and the dark opens.
Boats tipped with light and moon on the water.
Elena Karina Byrne: Reality may still be unacceptable Gerhard Richter
A Repeating Dream I’m Belly-Down at Eleven
beneath barbwire like bedsprings during night-climbs
Sharon Fagan McDermott: This Against the Night
Sweet hyssop and the sweltering hives
from which sail bees, their resolute flight
into July, into my garden.
Elizabeth Kirschner: Jones Beach
He went out. Into the ocean’s black maw. To save. To rescue. Didn’t, as they say, come back. Death is funny like that, precise, dissolute.
Luray Gross: If Two People Are Aware of the Rising Moon
When his mind grew empty
and his heartbeat slowed to a vague stutter,
our father no longer walked the fields at night.
Carolyn Gregory: Listening to John Coltrane on my Mother’s Death Day
Swirling, confident, those sax notes stretch and blow
above the drums, full of his blue notes,
fifty years ago, new as now.
