Joy Olree

Where I Am Called

To go where I am called,
for where can mans time
best be spent except in
the presence of God.


Pictures of my World

Took a picture of a book
to read its’ words when
I am gone.

Took a picture of a brook
to feel its’ wet when I am
dry.

Took a picture of the wind
to feel its’ air when I can't
breathe.

Took a picture of the earth
to see my home when I am
lost.

Took a picture of the sky
to remember where my
parents are.

Took a picture of myself
so I would know who I am.

Took a picture of my camera
so when it breaks I'll have
its’ memories.

{Poetry by Joy Olree}

Susan Marie Davniero

Snowflakes Place

Winter’s gift
Floating adrift
Snowflakes flight
No two alike

Winter time
Supreme design
Clouds snowflakes fall
If flakes come at all

Winter’s beauty
Crystal symmetry
Snowflakes around
Kissing the ground

Winter’s fall from grace
Pardon snowflakes place
An ice beauty before
Melts into nothing more

{Poem by Susan Marie Davniero}

Peter Lattu

The Wild Braid: A Review

The Wild Braid by Stanley Kunitz with Genine Lentine reflects on poetry and gardening. The book arose from a series of conversations between Kunitz and Lentine between 2002 and 2004. Musing on gardening and poetry, Kunitz looked back on a century of doing both:

… the garden is a metaphor for the poems you write in a lifetime and give to the world in the hope that these poems you have lived through will be equivalent to the flower that takes root in the soil and becomes a part of the landscape. If you’re lucky, that happens with some of the poems you create, while others pass the way of so many plants you let into the garden, or grow from seed: they emerge and give pleasure for a season and then vanish.

The dozen poems included in The Wild Braid have taken root in our literary landscape.

Kunitz explains that writing poetry taps into the unconscious, “the wilderness” of which he said “its beasts are not within our control”. Other writers have seen creativity as like a beast emerging from the wilderness. The poet Gary Snyder wrote that his poems came from things lurking in the darkness at the edge of his campfire. The writer Stephen King said that his stories came from creatures in the shadows at the edge of his garden. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in “Inversnaid”: “Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.” Kunitz says of Hopkins: “… that’s exactly what he was saying. When people say they are moved by a poem they are saying they have been in touch with the untouchable.” Out of this wilderness of the unconscious come poems and they “seem to have no maker at all”.

While poems may come from the wilderness of the mind, Kunitz finds a lot of similarity between poems and gardens. Stanzas are like terraces, “letting our mind rest before moving on”. Revisiting a garden or a poem leads to new perspectives with different colorations. To Kunitz, a poem has a sense of secrecy like a flower about to unfold: “So much of the power of a poem is in what it doesn’t say as much as in what it does say.” He finds that poems are “muddied by too much explanation, too much exposure.”

For all the similarities, Kunitz enumerates ways a new poem differs from a garden:

Thinking of a new season in the garden feels different from imagining a new poem. The garden has achieved its form, it doesn’t have to be new each year. What it has to do is grow. You’re not going to uproot the entire garden and start all over. The poem is always a new creation and aspires to a transcendence that is beyond telling at the moment when you’re working on it. You know that you are moving into an area you’ve never explored before and there is the great difference.

Poems live in a wilderness beyond the garden.

The Wild Braid is an enchanting book: beautiful photographs, fine poems, and lucid conversations. Stanley Kunitz and Genine Lentine distill Kunitz’s century of gardening and writing into a short book full of insight into both.

{Essay by Peter Lattu}

Patrick T. Randolph

motherhood

Robin’s beak—
Fat earthworm,
Euphoric chirps!


secrets

Childhood voice
peeks out from
Memory’s eyes.


a study in linguistics

Winter stars
are Night’s verbs
in Sky language.

{Breath Poems by Patrick T. Randolph}

Kalifornia

Evil Ways

When I first met you I was obsessed
Your face, your body and the way that you dressed
You smiled and laughed and gave me stolen candy
You take what you want and use who is handy
A wink and a smile in your catholic school dress
You take their existence and accept nothing less
A boy or a girl whichever you choose
They fall prey to your beauty and that’s when they lose
Their mind, their soul nothing is wasted
I love your stolen candy it’s the best I’ve ever tasted

{Poem by Kalifornia}

Ray Gallucci

Water Drop

In icy cold of empty space,
It hitched a ride on comet's face,
Accelerating toward a star
Of recent birth, from distance far.

As sun of color yellow grew
In field of vision, met with two
Enormous spheres of frigid gas
That slightly altered comet's path.

Whereas before would swing around
The virgin star, now comet found
What was a clear path forward blocked
By cooling sphere of molten rock.

The impact spewed infernal heat
That vaporized it so completely.
But despite this extra speed,
From planet's pull could not be freed.

And so became a resident
Of cooling planet permanent.
With other zillions of its kind
Condensed into a watery rind.

Our planet's oceans may be older
Than whatever magma smolders
From beneath the ancient crust
Recycling iron back to rust.

I find myself in Ocean City
Strolling through the wavelets pretty,
Knowing that the ancient surf's
Touched every shore since planet's birth.

Expanding to enormous size,
Our dying sun will oceans fry,
Returning vapors where they came
In search of where new stars may flame.

{Poem by Ray Gallucci}

Stephanie Kaylor

Under an Old Apple Tree

In the field next to the orchard
a black stallion grazed upon the
lanky blades of grass while a white
mare tread softly around in circles
until he met her eye.

I turned my head and smiled,
resting against the gnarled
tree trunk while my daughter
floated along with the bees
through the golden light, filling
her basket as she picked an apple
from every tree,

fears I once had about my skin
seeing too much of the sun
evaporating into the pungent air
of life turned ripe, now seeing
that beauty is not something
you drape upon a powdered body,

but a feeling you can watch
under an old apple tree.

{Poem by Stephanie Kaylor}

John Grey

Cure-All

Another letter from you,
full of medical advice.
You write to my ailments,
not to me.
I’m beginning to think
it’s my headaches you miss,
the allergies, the cough.
You lived with them, not with me.
Your companion was the throb
behind my forehead,
the sneezing fits,
the cigarette hack of one
who never smoked.
I’m sure you only pretend
to want them cured
with your new—age remedies,
your lists of pharmaceutical web sites.
If I got better,
you’d be killing your own memories.
A clean bill of health for me
is five years stolen from your life.
You end your letter with the usual
“Love you.”
That’ s another cure that you
don’t really wish for me.

{Poem by John Grey}

A. J. Chilson

In Memoriam, for “Dandy Don” Meredith, 1938-2010

He used to sing “Turn out the lights, the party’s over,”
when the Monday night game neared its conclusion,
and it was time for all of us to head off to bed,
knowing we would get to hear that song once again.

The voice, though, has since become silent,
now drained in the memory of those who heard him.
The man known as “Dandy Don” has drifted off
into the sunset, where football stories continue
to be shared as though it had happened yesterday.

{Poem by A.J. Chilson}

Peter Lattu

the tree

gaily adorned
lights winking bright
amidst the black
midwinter night
until
stripped bare
and looking
forlorn
its passage
marks
a season gone
as time
passes on

{Poem by Peter Lattu}

Nathan Nobbe

Changing Beds

Being happy is a scary thought.
It means leaving behind an old friend,
An old friend named unhappiness.
We have shared so much time with him,
Have always found a sense of security
In the familiarity of his embrace.
To step out with happiness,
We have only allowed this at short intervals
Before feeling like an unfaithful lover
And running back to the comfort of his bed.
To wake up happy?
Oh my, this would be a bit like standing
At the edge of a cliff.
At the edge of a cliff with no confidence
In a sense of balance to be able
To remain there.
Ah yes, to remain wrapped in the snug
Blankets in the dark bed of unhappiness.
Much easier to do.
But why then complain of the plight,
To blame unhappiness for the comfort we feel.
We have chosen again his company through fear.
Goodbye we must say. Goodbye we must say.
And never, never look back.

{Poem by Nathan Nobbe}

Eliot Tracz

Picking Up The Pieces

We are left to wonder “Why?”
What could I have said, or
What could I have done?

How do we pick up the pieces
And try to make a whole, when
Everything that’s lost, was everything we had?

How a neighbors voice in the hall
During another sleepless night, is not
You coming home or calling to say “Hello.”

These questions have no answers,
The walls stare back in silence, and I am left alone-
To begin picking up the pieces.

{Poem by Eliot Tracz}

Anne Malin Ringwalt

Wanderer's Ghazal

Deface the meaning of your hands
lie lost in the sand, dig with someone else's hands.

Don't pity lost meaning when nothing tangible relates
my words plead you to rename your fate's hands.

Lost in Florence or Nice; a European coastline
find the architecture of stone, crumble in your hands.

In Moscow I sit on a broken chair
strung to the ceiling, I use the spindle, sew a quilt on your hands.

For Anne is said to be graceful and Malin clever
your farce disposition is not the meaning of your hands.

{Poem by Anne Malin Ringwalt}