Category: Poetry

Two Poems by Mike Chrisman

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After the aquarium

I hadn’t known I would want a ceremony
when my big angelfish died
that I raised from a nickel-sized thing
to a silver dollar or greater, but I didn’t
want to toss it in the toilet
like my grandfather’s cigarette butts,
so my ten-year-old daughter and I
bundled up against February
and walked the road a half mile
until the culvert that opens
into a pool almost deep enough
to swim, certainly to snag a brookie
or two as the neighbor boys will,
then down the steep bank six or eight
feet through thigh-deep snow, my daughter
struggling in my path until we stood
at the pool’s edge, where I said some words
about a fish from the tropics gracing
our northern home, then thanked it before
bending down to let it slide
from the plastic bag, surrounded
by warm aquarium water, shiny
onto the icy brook’s surface, where
it spun briefly before catching
current southward, down Avery Brook
to the Deerfield, the wide Connecticut,
into Long Island Sound, the sea…
then father and daughter trudged
home, while the fish receded
into memory. As will we.


View from el parque central

on a wooden bench watching the tourists,
the Mayans, the pigeons navigating
among each other, the concrete
path littered with fallen
jacaranda petals. I’m sitting
to eat my little cup of ice cream
and remembering an ancient time:
summer, Central Illinois, and Zesto
soft-serve, plus three kids
happy with their cones;
a nickel each in ’55 –
cheap even then – and the short trip
home in our Chevy station wagon
perched on a more dangerous bench:
the tailgate lowered, where we ride
backward, our short legs nearly
touching the pavement … and jouncing
slowly across the train tracks –
“Hold on, kids!” to the house,
where our big collie waits
to greet us, his reward the sweet
and soggy cone-bottoms none of us
would have believed might survive
in memory seventy years after the fact.




Mike Chrisman is retired, living in Antigua, Guatemala. He worked for years in the mental health field in rural Western Massachusetts. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing at UMass Amherst. Chrisman has three daughters and five grandkids. His poetry book, Little Stories, has an ISBN, and his own translation of the Bible, The Bible: Warts and All  is on Amazon Kindle.

“The Early Bird Gets the Worm Ballade” by Mary Winslow

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Before fishing hour, psalms speak low
when quiet starts becoming restless
Canadian geese muttering slow
bacon and butter sizzle and wake us
the morning chases off the stillness
next the mist, then it starts raining
dawn, but it feels midnight nonetheless
minds swaddled simple as sun’s sleeping

I glance at the clock on the bureau
the fog lingers on diaphanous
a sliver of night silvers shallow
see the worm, that threadbare little cuss
in daffodils birds rustle the campus
the thistle where morning comes flying
the hungry aren’t yet ambitious
minds swaddled simple as sun’s sleeping

This Atlas beast at daybreak should know
and yet doesn’t hurry into business
when the magic hour of life’s marrow
sliding from night into consciousness
those on the fiddle can poach in the mess
who stagger or roll, some sleepwalking
without regular terms of success
minds swaddled simple as sun’s sleeping

Envoy

The robin arrives in best spring dress
no need for plan, she’s simply walking
before the law, there’s naught to transgress
minds swaddled simple as sun’s sleeping




Mary Winslow has been writing poetry for over 30 years. Her poems have appeared in The Road Not Taken, the Antigonish Review and many other journals and magazines. Her translation of Norwegian poetry has appeared in the Journal, in Wales. She has taught English at colleges and universities throughout the United States. She lives about an 18-mile canoe paddle from the shores of Canada on the Olympic Peninsula and teaches part-time in the Writing Center at Peninsula College.

Two Poems by Wilfred Owen

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Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) was a British poet whose powerful works provide some of the most poignant insights into the horrors of World War I. Born in Oswestry, Shropshire, England, Owen grew up in a lower-middle-class family. His early education sparked an interest in poetry, and he was influenced by Romantic poets such as John Keats. However, it was his experiences as a soldier during World War I that would most profoundly shape his poetic voice and themes.

Owen enlisted in the British Army in 1915, at the age of 22. He was initially enthusiastic about joining the war effort, driven by a sense of duty and patriotism. His perspectives, however, drastically shifted after witnessing the brutal realities of trench warfare. In 1917, he suffered from shell shock (now known as post-traumatic stress disorder) and was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, where he met fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon. This meeting proved crucial, as Sassoon became a mentor and friend, encouraging Owen to channel his experiences of war into his poetry.

Owen’s poems, written during the last two years of his life, are marked by their vivid imagery and intense emotional force. In stark contrast to romanticized portrayals of war, his poems expose war’s brutality and the suffering of soldiers. Works such as “Dulce et Decorum Est” and “Anthem for Doomed Youth” found below are renowned for their bold depictions of the physical and psychological trauma experienced by combatants. His use of half-rhyme, vivid descriptions, and shocking realism set his work apart from other war poetry of the time.

Tragically, Owen was killed in action on November 4, 1918, just one week before the Armistice that ended World War I. His death cut short a promising literary career, but his legacy endures through his powerful poetry, which continues to resonate with readers. Published posthumously, his work has become some of the most significant literary accounts of World War I, forever altering the perception of war in English literature.


Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.



Anthem for Doomed Youth

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
      — Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
      Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells; 
      Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
      And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
      Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
      The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.




The informational article above was composed in part by administering guided direction to ChatGPT. It was subsequently fact-checked, revised, and edited by the editor. The editor/publisher takes no authorship credit for this work and strongly encourages disclosure when using this or similar tools to create content. Sparks of Calliope prohibits submissions of poetry composed with the assistance of predictive AI.

Two Poems by Mark B. Hamilton

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Work Days*

Four details under command,
sentries posted and hidden
near fellers, haulers, and carpenters,
protecting the wattling men.

Trees slash through breezes,
their branches trimmed and begun.
In warmth, our breath has a gill
poured now-and-again.

Those who favor chunking wood
have their own hand-hewn tools
in constant motion wearing smooth,
while the lazy ones act the fools.

With hide buckets full of mud,
leaves and twigs for wattle,
one man inside, one man out,
both chinking on one bottle.

Logs are notched and placed,
oxen shaking their coats,
the goods and blankets drying out
as Floyd tallies up the Boat.

Willard and Roberson return
with letters from St. Louis,
sharing news of wooden walks
and women sightings to remind us.

They help to stow the heavy stores
neatly in good order, amusing us all
with stories of excess to please us,
while stretching them up real tall.

The ice builds. We caulk and trim.
Whitehouse and York apace,
two sawyers with a saw that sings
back and forth in place.

Winds do give, then take away
that bee-sweet scent of resin,
from seasoned arms a tug-of-war
between them both can win.

Repeating a task is never easy,
to relax your strength until
a calming frees the bind—a pace
is best that ends in skill.

* An original history-based poem adapted from: Gary E. Moulton, editor, The Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, Volume 2, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), ibid, 141-42.
“Work Days” previously appeared in Plainsongs.


Camp & Mess

The palisades of oak would cast their shade
inside the fort, until the sun had risen
to form a space of heated mud that made
our work unpleasant. In short, it was an oven.
Our endless constant chores caused little pride,
the continual supervision was an irritation
unless scrubbing a kettle, or stretching a hide
was one’s cherished idea of an army ambition.
Yet everyday, a lucky man was reassigned
to work outside the gate. His replacement
would grouse, argue and bray, only to find
that barracks duty was not a personal affront.
The work was for the common good, and central
to our health—as necessary as salting a barrel.

“Camp & Mess” previously appeared in The Lyric.




Mark B. Hamilton (MFA, University of Montana) works in diachronic forms to transform content, adapting from both Eastern and Western traditions.

His poems appear widely in the US, and sometimes abroad: e.g., The Lyric Magazine, Naugatuck River Review, About Place Journal, Oxford Poetry, and Stand Magazine. Recent ecopoetry volumes include: LAKE, RIVER, MOUNTAIN (Cornerstone Press, University of Wisconsin, 2024), the chapbook UPSTREAM (Finishing Line Press, 2024), and the book OYO: The Beautiful River (Shanti Arts Publishing, 2020).

As a scholar of pre-industrial America, his researched essays have been published in: The Heritage of the Great Plains, The Bulletin of the Chicago Society of Herpetology, We Proceeded On, and History Magazine, with inclusion into the Folk Life Archives, US Library of Congress. For additional information about the author, visit:  MarkBHamilton.WordPress.com.

“Ghost Girl” by Joshua Frank

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One sunny May, I ran to play,
When I was twelve years old,
Upon the hill. I miss her still—
A girl with curls of gold
In ribbon ties, big sky-blue eyes,
And waving, dark-red dress
Soon ran my way and asked to play—
How could I not say yes?

“I’m Beth,” she said. “My mother’s dead;
I’m hiding from her ghost.”
I thought, “A shame, her gruesome game,”
But soon I was engrossed.
We laughed and played along the grade,
Cavorted up the hill,
And soon rolled down, clothes turning brown,
Collapsed, and then lay still.

Then Beth and I stared toward the sky,
Then wrestled, then caressed,
And very soon that afternoon,
Our love began the rest.
We hoped our playing would one day
Give rise to married bliss.
I gazed into her pools of blue;
We leaned in for the kiss.

A woman’s ghost gave off the most
Horrendous, ghastly chill.
We stood upright in cold and fright;
Her ghost-hand reaped the kill.
I saw Beth die. Her ghost stood high
And quickly shed its shell.
Her ribbons fastened to the grass
As down her body fell.

Both, hand in hand, flew off the land.
Beth’s ghost was forced to go
Away from me like Annabel Lee,
But where, I’ll never know.
Then Beth up high bid me goodbye;
She waved as she looked back.
The two ghosts flew into the blue,
And everything went black.

I felt Mom shake me wide awake;
She’d found me on the hill.
“Are you all right?” She yelled in fright.
I sat up feeling ill.
I told her of my one-day love
And how she met her death.
My mother deemed it all a dream
And said there was no Beth.

So I believed I’d been deceived
And never met the lass,
Until I found, upon the ground,
Her ribbon coiled on grass.
The ghost who took her didn’t look
And left it unawares.
I picked the band up in my hand
And three blonde, curly hairs.

“Ghost Girl” was first published by The Society of Classical Poets.




Joshua C. Frank works in the field of statistics and lives in the American Heartland.  His poetry has been published in The Society of Classical Poets, Snakeskin, The Lyric, Sparks of Calliope, Westward Quarterly, New English Review, Atop the Cliffs, Our Day’s Encounter, The Creativity Webzine, Asses of Parnassus, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, All Your Poems, Verse Virtual, The Asahi Haikuist Network, LEAF Journal, and the anthology Whose Spirits Touch, and his short fiction has been published in New English Review, The Creativity Webzine, and Nanoism.

Two Poems by Felicia Nimue Ackerman

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ 1 Comment

Death Can Be Good

Death can be good.
I’ll tell you how.
Just have it come
Decades from now.

“Death Can Be Good” first appeared in Time Magazine.


Simon’s Sentiments

Can’t resist those cakes and pies?
I don’t judge you by your size.
I won’t care if you get fat.
I’ll still love you–
I’m your cat.

“Simon’s Sentiments” first appeared in The Providence Journal.




Felicia Nimue Ackerman is a professor of philosophy at Brown University and has had over 300 poems published in a wide range of places, including twenty-four in past issues of Sparks of Calliope.

And the nominees are…

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Best of the Net

Sparks of Calliope nominated six poems for inclusion in the 2025 Best of the Net Anthology, sponsored by Sundress Publications. Eligible poems appeared between July 1, 2023, and June 30, 2024, and were previously unpublished.

Best of the Net 2025 Nominees

“Flowers” by Gary Borck

“Along the Shoulder” by Terence Culleton

“Dear Son” by Jacqueline Jules

“Honeymoon” by James Mulhern

“The Metaphor of Work” by Ali Rowland

“Anticipation” by Beate Sigriddaughter


If you would like to view our previous nominations, you can find them here.

Two Poems by M. Brooke Wiese

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Tuesday Morning

On Tuesday morning on my way to work
I slipped and fell between two subway cars
while trying to avoid the smells and groping.
Everyone on board heard the screeching

wheels as it braked and torqued and buckled.
I overheard the engineer’s muffled chatter,
telling headquarters what exactly was the matter
as I lay shoehorned in between the rails

beneath the massive chassis, white-knuckled, hoping,
as the great behemoth’s underside slid
slowly over me, gouging my forehead,
flaying my palms, and leaving rust flakes in my eyelashes.

Suddenly at sea, submerged, I swam
beneath my Leviathan, touching my forehead to her
as I suckled, safe in the water, her calf,
her only daughter. I breached with whale-song and splashes.

I awoke in heaven, or someplace like it.
It was so beautiful, and everyone
was beautiful. My mother said, “Hold on.”
She looked so young. “Don’t come,” she said. “Don’t come.”

On Wednesday I was in the morning papers.
On Thursday I was back at work and coping.
To be honest, the weekend was lost in bars.
And Tuesday I slipped between two subway cars.


Rubaiyat Written in the Hospital Waiting Room

In the waiting room of a famous cancer
hospital in New York, a man
is sleeping, head back, mouth agape,
his wife’s bag beside him on the cream and tan damask.

He seems to be the only one asleep.
With a direct view of a large, tranquil seascape
on the far wall, perhaps he dreams
of fishing in Barbuda, or some other escape.

At least in here, thank god, there are no screams.
It’s quiet as a library, or the gentle rains
that come in late summer. People talk softly
or not at all, lost in their thoughts and daydreams.

An older woman in a persimmon sari
with green-apple edging sits surrounded by family,
standing in blue jeans or suits; only one is weeping –
I know what she’s thinking, “If only, if only…”

Old friends, two women are speaking.
Someone from Housekeeping is busy sweeping.
A thin young woman I’ve seen before, barely
out of her teens, looks thinner. She’s disappearing.

And what of me? Yes, that’s me over there,
beneath the painting, reporting on how this lottery is unfair:
a life suspended, neither in nor out, nothing nor all –
all while awaiting a turn in the chemo chair.

When I was small the Ouija Board foretold I’d fall
and die at thirty-one, but then, oh well…
Now, like all of us here, my every “then”
is forestalled, as we listen, always, for the Reaper’s footfall.




M. Brooke Wiese has published most recently in The Road Not Taken, Sparks of Calliope, The Chained Muse, and Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, and is forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry Review. Her chapbook has been accepted by Finishing Line Press, and her sonnets have been taught by poet Billy Collins to his college students.

Two Poems by Carol Lynn Grellas

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At Dinner Time

–after “On the Back Porch” by Dorianne Laux

I lean against the chilly glass and peer
through to a mirage of greenery, leaf-filled 
wings, into another world outside the sliding 
door, the patio filled with hummingbirds
dipping and diving, enjoying the sugar
water, I’ve just refreshed the mosaic feeders.

It’s hard to say what I like most about
this part of the day. Maybe the fact
I know I have a good man waiting
for me in the other room, who soon
will sit beside me and spoon the tomato 
bisque I’ll be making for dinner.

Behind me, my new puppy chases 
sliced carrots I’ve scattered across
a marble floor, they spin and slide, 
her paws pushing and pawing at thin 
orange carved veggies. Tomorrow
will be another day, something yet

to happen could change the course 
of my life, but at this moment, all things 
seem right. The ivy-overgrown rises
towards the roof tiles nearly reaching
the top, as they curl over the old brick
and become dormant for winter’s days.

They stagnate in slow motion as I gaze
at the gable, a sign of summer has ended. 
My youngest daughter sings a Joni Mitchel 
song playing her soft blue guitar. It fades
in and out of the room, her door open; 
I can see her sitting on the edge of her bed.

An aria fills the air with hope. Years ago, 
my parents would have been here, too. 
My mother, sipping her glass of chardonnay, 
noting on the chrysanthemum’s shade of lavender, 
my dad watching the news, asking when 
dinner will be ready, my grown children 
once creating bustling sounds of joy, 

family chaos since quieted. Oh, to the glory 
of little feet trampling past in a flurry of wonder, 
days vanished yet echo as I stand here, 
paralyzed for all that’s been and all that’s yet 
to be, my heart a binary organ forever 
divided by gratitude and grief.


Picture the Past

          It’s easy, you think, to remember being 
young—part child and animal, before you learned
what it meant to be human. I mean before
you did what you were told to be a good human
the kind of human your mother would be 
proud to say she created. You owe
your mother that, you think, once you’re old
enough to understand, gratitude, once 
you’re old enough to recognize guilt
and once you’re old enough to value 
what it means to have empathy.
          But it turns
out being young isn’t easy to remember
when you try because so much of your memory
is fueled by black-and-white photos
moments between breaths when someone,
probably your mother decided she needed
to keep your image forever. Who knows why,
as forever isn’t real, either, if you are talking
about a human lifespan. So, the memories
you have of being young are just a reimagining
of something now intangible.
          All this is to say
whatever you remember about that time in your life—
you were probably never as good as you thought
or as bad, and you weren’t even as you thought,
you were something else entirely and that something
else is the exact part you will never be again. So
remember, your remembering is serving one purpose,
to help or hurt your nostalgic heart: nothing you recall
from those days is or ever was the way you remember
it, which is the reason you’re able to go forward,
reinventing whatever is needed to carry on.




Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas is a graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts, MFA in Writing program. She is a thirteen-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a seven-time Best of the Net nominee. In 2012, she won the Red Ochre Chapbook Contest with her manuscript, Before I Go to Sleep. In 2018, her book, In the Making of Goodbyes was nominated for The CLMP Firecracker Award in Poetry, and her poem “A Mall in California” took 2nd place for the Jack Kerouac Poetry Prize. In 2019, her chapbook An Ode to Hope in the Midst of Pandemonium was a finalist in the Eric Hoffer Book Awards. In 2021, Her latest collection, Alice in Ruby Slippers, was short-listed for the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize and awarded an honorable mention in the Poetry category.

Her work can be found online and in print and has been featured in Mezzo Cammin, Verse Daily, and many more. She is a former editor-in-chief for the Tule Review and The Orchards Poetry Journal. She is currently a member of the Board of Directors for Women’s Wisdom Art, an organization in Sacramento that supports women’s wellness through creativity in all forms. Her latest collections of poetry, Handful of Stallions at Twilight (Finishing Line Press) and A Shared and Sacred Space (Kelsay Books), are newly released this past summer.

Two Poems by Deepa Onkar

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ 2 Comments

Stillness Heals

At dawn, I watch a water lily –
its petals closed – among
leaves and dark reflections
on the pond’s skin. We almost
touch — the pond and I:
I watch the submerged shadows
of my pain rise. Slow ooze
of light, ripples of breath.
Not everything is seeking stillness,
as I am — there’s the tumult of fish
and frog in the bed and a loud flurry
of bird-noises from trees. The water lily
stirs, imperceptibly. Not long
until it wakes, not long until I heal.


Glow

By the time the sky turns a darker shade
of dusk I’ve snapped out of the illusion
that with one quick turn I will walk down
my old garden path. The marigolds
and balsam have dissolved into the rubble,
and there’s not a trace of the wildflowers—
those slips of colour that turned up
in the grass at playtime: here, by this stump
of a tree I’d lie on shimmering moss,
examine the tiny perfection of petal
and phyllid.

Where there’s a fragment of a fence
now, I’d lie — trying to wish on a star
as it shot across the dark, always too quick.
Sometimes, a wish was a meandering firefly—
I’d watch it as it made its lazy trail
to the edge of nothingness
sub-atomic, scintillating. There was so much
that glowed: snails’ trails and mushrooms
and the undersides of leaves —
I wish I had wished on them
instead of giving my light away to the skies.

The stars are showing up one by one.
Here I am, observing them
observing the erasures of the earth
and the ways of the heart —
this must be survival.




Deepa Onkar lives in Chennai, India. She believes that the quiet and reflective spaces that she writes poetry in enable her to freely explore her thoughts and feelings at depth, and offer her a window to witness the magic of creation. Her poems have appeared in The Lake, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Sonic Boom, Poetica Review, The Lothlorien, and others.