Month: March 2025

Two Poems by Duane L Herrmann

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In Just One Moment

Exploding inside me
emotions, feelings
I didn’t know existed
overwhelmed me
as I held, new
tiny human creature
I’d never seen before
and she calmed
hearing my voice,
all she needed
in that moment when
her life turned upside down,
but one point remained
and was enough.
I was lost in love
and my little life
never the same again:
I was now “Father.”


Success One

I have succeeded despite
constant failure
constant lack
absence of acceptance
all through childhood.
I’ve proved that wrong.
I am competent.
I am able
I am capable
I have achieved
and far more than those
against me.
Their efforts to restrain,
silence me,
utterly failed.
I am success!
I can carry myself
with satisfaction.




Duane L. Herrmann is an internationally published, award-winning poet and historian. His work has been translated into several languages and published in a dozen countries, in print and online. He has seven full-length collections of poetry, a sci-fi novel, a history book, and more chapbooks. His poetry has received the Robert Hayden Poetry Fellowship, inclusion in American Poets of the 1990s, Map of Kansas Literature (website), Kansas Poets Trail and others. These accomplishments defy his traumatic childhood embellished by dyslexia, ADHD, a form of mutism and, now, PTSD. He spends his time on the prairie with trees in the breeze and writes – and loves moonlight!

Two Poems by Michael Farrell

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Inner Symphony

A baton raises, and it begins:
The Symphonie Fantastique,
Berlioz’ personal passion play.
Notes, only notes to me;
Much more to her.
Inside her chest- deeper than the rhythmic heart-
A hidden heart, chamber-less,
One I cannot know, may not own,
Suffused with music,
Releases itself.
I turn to watch her
As her tears break their moorings.
The young virtuoso stands rooted on the wooden stage,
Yet not there:
Lifted,
Wholly in flow,
Wholly carried, drawn by bow and string.
She is carried with him,
No-is him for a time.
I felt what he felt up there,
She says.
I was him playing the piece,
She says.
I only returned to me when he ended,
She reveals,
Says she cannot fully explain.
A rare gift, I tell her.
To live within another’s space
Even for a moment
Is the writer’s sole wish,
The artist’s dream.


On A Porch As It Rains

Lean back.
Rest,
Hands easy on the knees.
Watch this quenching curtain
Slake the earth
As the sky whispers wet,
And puddles dance specks of life.
The thrumming of drops on leaves
Calms the mind.
The body loses itself
In an indissoluble moment.




Michael Farrell was born in Bayshore, Long Island but moved to the beautiful Finger Lakes region of New York when he was four. He and his wife work from home together. He writes poetry and short fiction.

Two Translations by Rachel Lott

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ 2 Comments

Translations from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Das Buch der Bilder

Maiden Melancholy

A knight, as from a proverb old,
comes riding into mind.

He came. So through the wood and wold
the storm may come and all enfold.

He passed. So evening’s benison
may pass before your prayers are done,
forsaken by the bell;
and though you’d cry aloud with woe,
you only whimper, long and low
into your kerchief cold.

A knight, as from a proverb old,
rides armored, far and fell.

His smile was fine, and softly shone
like antique light on elven-bone,
like homesickness, like Christmas snow
on darkling rooftops, like the row
of pearls set round a turquoise stone;
like soft moon-glow
upon a book loved well.

Read the original German “Mädchenmelancholie” here.


The Boy

When I grow up, I want to be like them.
They ride on wild horses through the night.
Their torches, in a trail of blazing light,
whip back like hair behind them in the wind.

I’d stand in front, as if to steer a barge,
large and like a flag I’d just unrolled,
dark, but with a helmet all of gold
alight and restless. At my back, in rank,
ten men from that same darkness in a flank,
with helmets glinting restlessly as mine,
now clear as glass, now dark and old and blind.

And one stands by me, trumpeting “make way!”
with blasts like lightning, driving all things back;
he trumpets us a loneliness so black
we speed like dreams along our rapid way.

The houses fall behind us to their knees,
beside us bow the alleys and the lanes,
we capture every place that tries to flee
and thunder on, our horses like the rains.

Read the original German “Der Knabe” here.




Rachel Lott has a background is in medieval philosophy (PhD, University of Toronto), and currently teaches Latin, logic, and English writing at private online secondary schools. In her spare time she writes and translates poetry. Her poems have appeared in First Things, the children’s magazine Cricket, and on the website of the Society of Classical Poets.

Two Poems by Amelia Hopkins

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Mother’s Nature

You once told me mother
That life starts and ends
With death

And in the pit of my stomach
I felt what I would call
Your simultaneous love
And anguish now
But at the time,
It was just a child’s belly ache.

I didn’t see it mother
I wasn’t watching
When you buried your past lives
To give me just one and
I had been sleeping
When you held a wake for your dreams
I think I was eating
While you starved yourself and
Drinking as you swallowed your needs but

I understand now mother
You thought you were like everything else alive
And that you were made to be
Split open and
Sucked dry and
Devoured
And that you were meant to
Bend and
Give way and
Wither
And die
And die
And die again
Until you die.


First Love

My mother was my first land
Her body my first abode
Her womb the first place that I belonged
And now I’ve strayed too far from home.




Amelia Numa Hopkins lives in London. The student loan company has her on record as a PhD student of psychoanalysis, her uncle is convinced she’s a writer, and her mum thinks she laughs too loud. Her dog reckons she’s awesome. Amelia just knows she’s interested in this world and the people in it. She likes to write about it sometimes.

Two Poems by Gregory E. Lucas

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Two Friars on a Hillside

Inspired by Two Friars on a Hillside by Fra Bartolommeo, pen and brown ink, Florentine, 1472-
1517.

Two friars stroll on a hillside
while the feeble sun hides
in a sky as gray as stones.
The wilderness is barren and motionless,
but bent trees still stand like decrepit men.
Under their withered branches, leaves
lie buried in midwinter’s calm.
The friars clutch their robes
and bow their heads.
They ponder holy verses
and a mystic’s cryptic words.
One extols the virtues of a saint;
the other praises the glories of this world
but dreams of a paradise to come.
As the day slips through a misty door, otherworldly
light floods the earth, and silence offers proof.


The Tragedy

After Pablo Picasso’s painting The Tragedy, 1903. Spanish-born artist.

Cloud cover thins and rises
above the moon’s wounded eyes.
The barefoot family of three
shivers at the ocean’s rippled brink.

The frigid wind
whispers warnings of a gaping void
and carries scents of decay.
Turning her back on hope, the mother
rocks the dead baby cradled in her arms.

Her sobs reverberate
in the indifferent night, while
again, the haggard father asks, Why?

The only answer is a far-off
seabird’s fading dirge.
Glitters on the sea dim.
The sky’s last gleams vanish, leaving
no star to offer guidance.

A baffled boy of six or seven
begs for explanations, and finality
replies in the language of shattering waves.

No more shifting shadows among varied hues.
Grief stains Earth with a dull monochrome.

Nothing’s left except them—
huddled, gazing inward.




Gregory E. Lucas writes fiction and poetry. His poems and short stories have appeared in many magazines, such as The Ekphrastic Review, Blueline, and The Horror Zine. His X handle is @GregoryELucas.

Two Poems by D. A. Cooper

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Still

The puppeteer prepares for coming night—
he sweeps the floor, hangs tools above the still
unpainted woodland scenery. Pale light
strikes fantoccini spines.

Twilight invades the shop as sunlight flees
through branches where a half-built nest hangs still.
A wooden woodpecker lies by the trees
on the unbending grass.

Three marionettes look on with dread.
Why does the little birdie stay so still?
They linger by the corpse. One says, It’s dead,
I think. The shadows mutter.

A fourth, much larger puppet hangs behind
the little marveling marionettes stock-still.
How did the birdie die? they ask. His mind
is filled with tangled lines:

It was its time. Hanging inert, he gazes
into the empty shell. A minute still
they watch. The sun sprints through its final phases,
forsakes the lifeless mass.

They float back to their half-built home, their life
of painted wood. They think about what still
lies on the lawn, about the ancient knife
that cut its strings, and shudder.


Hiding from the Kids

I’m hiding in my closet eating candy—
the lights are off, so no one knows I’m here.
It has become my modus operandi,
when overwhelmed or tired, to disappear.

I hear them searching for me high and low,
they’re calling out to me—I stay stock-still.
Eventually, they’ll find me, this I know,
because for them, the seeking is a thrill.

My little Psyches yearn to see my face
illuminated by the light of day,
to smother me in kisses and embrace
me tight enough so I can’t fly away.

I love my children more than life itself,
but I just need a minute to myself.




D. A. Cooper is a poet from Texas. His work has also recently appeared in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Dialogue Journal, Light, Lighten Up Online, New Verse Review, The Road Not Taken, and Witcraft, among others. He enjoys translating dialect poetry from Italy, watching The Office, and looking at trees.

Two Poems by Matthew Johnson

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The Neighborhood Rhapsody

Mothers and grandmothers take turns
Looking over the brood, gripping their eyes to the world
That is their neighborhood.
 
Young men whose shifts begin in the evening, or began in the morning,
Bark at each other over feet that may or may not have
Been over the three-point line, and they get dizzy, 
Smack-talking and chasing each other over the perimeter and under the sun.
 
Little girls hopscotch on days-old chalk,
And come round again, joyfully,
And patiently wait for each other’s turn.
 
The rest of the kids, perfecting the method of carelessness,
Open the hydrants, bathing in the waters of the city,
Washing the sweat and sun that coated the skin,
That had left only dust.
 
A million bees zoom on by,
Tilting their heads one way,
And then to the other, looking for flowers.
 
The chatter of old men talking gossip and old athletes they remembered
Is far more interesting than their marathon games of dominoes.
 
When the golden gaze of the sun has faded,
Street meat smoke and spices rub up against the stars,
Perfuming the air with tastes and tenderness,
And the days are so long, that we lose track of the hours…


A Character Analysis of Michael Corleone

Al Pacino as Michael didn’t make it cool to be a gangster; 
Capone, Scarface, and Nino Brown seemed to have a lot more fun
When they were depicted in cinema,
Seeing how far they could push themselves and the world to its limits,
All the while, flaunting death and feeding poison to the neighborhood.
There’s no glamour in the vice in the second Godfather like in other mob movies;
There’s a lot of compromising and negotiating, 
Like discussions between senators.
He’s not cursing. He’s not using drugs. 
He’s not jubilant on jobs and hits well done. 
Shootouts between rival mobs are sexy on the big screen and television;
But for Michael, this Macbeth of Mario Puzo,
The battles are mental burdens and betrayals
And failing marriages, and so they aren’t things
I nor audiences would be inspire to emulate. 
And yet, I can suffer with him, despite it.




Matthew Johnson is the author of the poetry collections, Shadow Folks and Soul Songs (Kelsay Books), Far from New York State (New York Quarterly Press), and the chapbook, Too Short to Box with God (Finishing Line Press). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The African American Review, Heavy Feather Review, London Magazine, and elsewhere. He has been recognized with several nominations and recognitions, including from the Best of the Net, Grand View University, Hudson Valley Writers Center, and Pushcart Prize. He’s the managing editor of The Portrait of New England and poetry editor of The Twin Bill. Learn more at https://www.matthewjohnsonpoetry.com.

Two Poems by Felicia Nimue Ackerman

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To My Fellow Old People (Oops, “Seniors”)

I know we’re all supposed to say
We’re not afraid to die.
But when you claim to feel that way,
I want to ask you why.
You think it’s time to step aside
Because your work is done?
No way I’ll take that as my guide—
I’m having too much fun!

“To My Fellow Old People (Oops, “Seniors”)” first appeared in Light Poetry Magazine.


Proposal to Professor Superstar

 Come marry me! Come be my love
(Or fake it that you love me).
The job I crave is at your school,
But others rank above me.

The old boy system didn’t die.
It took a new direction.
Today the favored form of pull
Is marital connection.

To hold you fast when we’re a pair,
They’ll surely want to hire me.
When I get tenure, we can split.
There’s no way they can fire me.

“Proposal to Professor Superstar” first appeared in The Providence Journal.




Felicia Nimue Ackerman is a professor of philosophy at Brown University and has had around 330 poems published in a wide range of places, including twenty-eight in past issues of Sparks of Calliope.