Tag: Poetry

Two Poems by Angela Hoffman

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ Leave a comment

Advent of a Long Marriage

A swirl of grace like the wind
clears the way for what’s underneath,
swallows what seems beyond reach,
and a feeling of deep peace is left
in this commonplace space
where we’ve been anchored.

There is a softness, a slowness,
and familiarity gives off it own glow,
so we watch, stay awake,
the wise knower in each of us
heralding what grabs our attention.
We ponder what has pierced our souls,
forcing the bloom in winter.
There is room for it all.

We become aware how each act
in a long marriage
committed to patience,
hastens towards love,
unaware we were moving mountains.
And so we begin again, another day of visitations;
spirit revealing gifts, repairing wounds,
honoring the beauty in the broken.
We fall to our knees. We quake at the light.


Breathe Deep

While reading a meditation
on the necessity of holding onto wonder,
I mistook the word nuance for manure
which took me down a subtly different path
of the mundane and extraordinary;

diamonds in a dung heap,
flowers emerging from the foul,
and not a Watchmaker but a Gardener
who thought me, brought me
into being, from who knows what.

Undeniably we sense decay;
all that is unlovely in this world,
but if we pause, breathe deep,
we will perceive the beauty dropped
into every ordinary moment.




Angela Hoffman lives in Wisconsin. With her retirement from teaching and the pandemic coinciding, she took to writing poetry. Her poetry has been widely published. Angela’s collections include Hold the Contraries, forthcoming 2024, Olly Olly Oxen Free, 2023 (nominated for the Eric Hoffer Book Award), and Resurrection Lily, 2022 (Kelsay Books).

Two Poems by Norman Solowey

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Arise

Arise all ye characters of the Globe!
Play out your inward lives for all to see!
Your shrouded secrets publicly disrobe!
Naked, Shakespeare thus gave life to thee.
Kings and rascals loosed upon the stage
in treacherous villainy and Love’s sweet scope,
where thund’rous Tempers, Tempests, Heavens rage
and tragedies and fears contend with hope.
Is there an untamed author writing free,
who moves in us and in whose motion
sets us on the world, personality
afire, heaving with emotion
marveling at a strange and wondrous birth
and if something dire we have yet to do on earth?


Still Here

Death is a closed door.
No one can open it.
Not even the dead, apparently.

There is no Orpheus to sing them through the gates,
no Eurydice to look back upon in anguished wonder.

Are those on the other side
resting in perfect oblivion?

Or are those on the other side
engulfed in an unimaginable darkness,
shorn of all senses
left to wander in maddening solitude?

Or do those on the other side
stand in the pure light of Goodness?
Do they bang on the door,
frantically waving their arms,
shouting out warnings,
desperate to get our attention?

Or do those on the other side
stand in the pure light of Love,
weeping for us, as we weep for them,
reaching out to us, yearning to touch
our wracked and grieving hearts,
willing us to weep for every earthly being
as we would weep for our own
mothers, fathers, sons or daughters?

Or do those on the other side
stand in the pure light of Serenity
unjudging and unjudged?
Do they not stand before the same soul-stretching stars
as we, before the same surging seas,
before the same heaving hills and voluptuous valleys,
do they not hear the same sonorous songbirds

exultantly crying to the morning:
“Listen! After the long night, I am still here!”




Norman Solowey is a graduate of Rutgers University with a degree in psychology. He writes poetry to explore the deep mysteries of existence and for the sheer joy of creating. His wife, daughters and grandchildren are the center of his universe. His work has appeared in The Lyric. He lives, loves and writes in Lake Monticello, Virginia.

Two Poems by Kiyoshi Hirawa

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The Museum of Modern Matrimony

One out of two marriages becomes a museum,
a sprawling, brawling Guggenheim
where feuding tour guides curate
dueling exhibits.

Art imprecates life
far more than life imprecates art,
so the galleries go up first.
Impressionist portraits of absinthe arguments.
Realism exhibitions on what happened
at the office at night.
Surrealistic landscapes agonizing over
the persistence of memory.

Paleontology thunders in,
with its insufferable, insoluble debates.
Did Matrimonius Rex evolve from the Pregosaur?
Would Divorciraptor hunt in packs?
Was the extinction of F. elicitas gradual or abrupt?
What, if anything, can be extracted
from an A. morous trapped in amber?

Love letters are burned,
but plenty of parchment fills the historical archives.
Declarations of war and independence.
Emancipation proclamations.
Revisionist history divided by B.C. and A.D.
Before Conjugium.
Anno Divortium.

Giant pendulums offer important lessons
on the movement of bodies.
A body in emotion tends to stay in emotion.
Force equals sass times frustration.
For every attraction, there is an equal and opposite distraction.

Rocks remember,
but everyone forgets the geology exhibits.
Eroded sentimentary layers.
Glaciation rates, permafrost expansion.
Continental drift, a few centimeters each year.

And of course,
the gift shop,
just past the “Friends of the Museum” donor wall,
where fieldtrippers buy models
to build at home.


Sleet-slapped (on Dia De Los Muertos)

Disgrace sent me spiraling back
into the single-strand spiderweb of my hometown.
Forty-two relatives
from five generations
were lying in wait.

Past the event horizon
of the cemetery gates,
I metronomed between gravesites.
Contemplated the debris of one century, then another.
Evaded the forty-second marker in Babyland.

No picnics, no pan de la muerta, no champurrado,
only the vomiting of my affliction, my unearned shame,
my words falling on dead ears.

Rising from the constellation of tombstones,
Los Muertos glittered and glowered
and suckerpunched the clouds purple and blue,
unfurling the family’s bruised tapestry:

the emigrations, and the newly arrived
building altars for the newly deceased;
the alkaline soil, and the collapsed family farms;
those who pushed farther west, and the rain that did not;
polio and scarlet fever,
stiff joints and stiff wheelchairs,
and joints that refused to bend, not even to propose;
miscarriages and SIDS deaths,
the children that never were and those that would always be;
the gas leak and house explosion,
the single wall that remained and the family that didn’t;
vehicle collisions, accidental or otherwise,
the forsaken highways and jilted gravel roads;
alcoholism and mental illness,
children raised on steady diets of abuse and suicide;
bitter feuds with relatives abiding two decades of silence,
now stashed two feet apart, headstones faced away from each other.

The rain turned brittle.
November, La abuela más antigua,
sleet-slapped my face and tugged my earlobe,
stage-whispering dirges and elegies.

I waited until my sleeves were soaked,
then wiped clean one hundred and fifty years
of sandstone, granite, and marble.
My laughter blessed the boneyard.




Kiyoshi Hirawa is a poet and writer whose work focuses on trauma, resiliency, hope, and providing a voice for the unheard, ignored, and overlooked. Hirawa’s work has been featured most recently in Plainsong Review, Hole in the Head Review, and The Shallot.

Two Poems by Peter Austin

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ 1 Comment

Virginia

When Virginia walked into the river,
Too loaded down by cobbles to have floated
Her suicide note was grossly misquoted
By Time Magazine. ‘I cannot forgive her
For surrendering to wartime malaise,’
Responded a self-satisfied archdeacon:
‘Shall we follow suit and helplessly weaken,
Step, arms raised, into the Hadean blaze?

‘Not so…!’ Time, Leonard shot back, had distorted
Terror at the approach of insanity
Into purely onanistic vanity:
Were they proud at having thus misreported…?
Further deepening the article’s stain,
Next week, unmended, it appeared again.

[Virginia Woolf took her life in March,
1941. It was her note addressed to her
husband Leonard that Time Magazine
egregiously misquoted. It is now thought
that she suffered from bipolar disorder.
Among her antecedents and relatives,
mental illness was common.]


Ingrid

Falsely accused of infidelity,
From the horn-mad head of the household shorn,
Ingrid Jonker’s mother slid into beggary
And madness, before her daughter was born.
He, a pro-apartheid M.P., once more
Inflamed when Ingrid, grown, denounced his views,
Got to his feet in the chamber and swore
She wasn’t his, snatching the front-page news.

Prize-winning poet now, unreconciled
To her father’s corundum-hearted curse,
She saw the shooting death of a black child,
Spewed it out in incendiary verse
And, seeing no way on but self-remotion,
Walked on resolute legs into the ocean.

[Ingrid Jonker, winner of the Afrikaans
Press-Booksellers literary prize, in 1963,
died two years later, at the age of thirty-
one. Remotion means removal.]




Peter Austin is a retired professor of English who spends his time writing stage plays for young people and poems for adults. Of his second collection, X. J. Kennedy (winner of the Robert Frost award for lifetime contribution to poetry) said, “He must be one of the best living exponents of the fine old art of rhyming and scanning in English.”

Two Poems by Anu Kandikuppa

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ 1 Comment

Evenings After Dinner

Sometimes, evenings after dinner
when I’m on all fours scouring
the kitchen floor with my Murphy
oil scented rag, having previously
done the dishes and before that
fed the children, paired socks like
to like, made lists: Drano eggs
oranges, all the while thinking I
don’t want to be here doing this—
sometimes I think I ought to be
more grateful to my floor. It grounds
me. It isn’t worthy of my disdain. There
isn’t much in the whole wide world
as sure as this, is there, that floors
will become dirty and need you
to clean them again? At the end of
another day straining to bring
my bashful genius to the attention
of an unconscious world I should
think it nice to be given something,
if only an obliging squeak to a
barefoot step.


Family Reunion

Four sisters, grown old
their faces converged
to their mother’s—
not in the features of course
but in the look of comical surprise
that there wasn’t going to be
more




Anu Kandikuppa has written essays, flash fiction, and short stories appearing in journals such as Colorado Review and Michigan Quarterly Review. Anu worked as an economics consultant in a former life and lives in Boston. Her website is www.anukandikuppa.com.

Two Poems by James Mulhern

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ 1 Comment

Honeymoon

She asks me to put bacitracin on her heel.
“Do you see a small cut?”
I nod and rub the ointment against the crack.
Her feet are calloused and rough.
“That feels good.” She sighs.

I see her honeymoon picture on the end table.
My mother and father could be my children.
Waving from the past, bright eyes and lips,
she resembles Elizabeth Taylor in a hat.
Both dressed in fine apparel,
expectant, happy, apprehensive expressions.
“What you looking at?” She glances to the side.
“Oh, that,” she says softly. I rub Aveeno into her feet.
Tilting her head back, she closes her eyes and smiles.

The room darkens. The rain outside taps a pane.
I think of how far these feet have walked,
the tenderness at the bottom of her sole.
Kneeling, I’m thankful to ease one hurt.
Her chest rises and falls, and soon she will sleep.

Someday later, I’ll hold the photograph
and remember this night—
the rain and the darkening eve.
I will see my mother waving to me.
Maybe I will feel the cut of pain, a sigh of love,
or nothing at all.


Session’s End

One day there is no news.
The anchors stare at empty teleprompters,
Eyes wide and twitching, lips quivering,
they look into the camera.

We change channels.
See black screens or people scrambling on sets,
Passing blank papers and whispering.
We do not hear what they say, and we do not care.

We are too tired to move.
Through the living room windows: trees and sky.
The wind blows and birds fly.
Somewhere snow falls and thunder booms.

But not here. There is no weather.
No drama, conflict, or story.
No wars, crimes, or political crises.
No empty talk. No sound and fury.

In a forest, high on a pine,
a wood thrush sings.
Deep in a dark-water cave,
the Emperor angelfish knocks.
A judge’s ruling: session’s end.
Someone shuts a door.




James Mulhern has appeared in literary journals over two hundred and fifty times and has been recognized with many awards. In 2015, Mr. Mulhern was granted a fully paid writing fellowship to Oxford University. A story was longlisted for the Fish Short Story Prize that same year. In 2017, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Two of his novels were Finalists for the United Kingdom’s Wishing Shelf Book Awards. His novel, Give Them Unquiet Dreams, was a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year. He was shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award 2020 for his poetry.

Two Poems by Ali Rowland

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ 1 Comment

The Metaphor of Work

They say “She held down a steady job
for many years” as if it were a wrestling match:
the job floored (literally!) but fighting back,
refuses to submit, a sweating,
heavy body lying prone as someone
counts the seconds out, but very slowly,
for years, in fact, like an interminable
nightmare.

Or perhaps an arresting cop is astride
this occupation, yelling at it to put
its arms behind its back, cuffs at the ready,
jangling metal adding to the symphony
of the street, the crunch of boots on gravel,
the job face down, struggling not to taste the dirt
between its teeth, struggling to breathe at all.

In any case, it doesn’t sound quite right.
You almost start to feel sympathy for the job,
to empathise with its chafing wrists
or shoulders pinned down uncomfortably
on the ground. And the poor thing is steady too,
like your first reliable boyfriend,
or the progress of a large container ship,
or a lucky rock you cling on to
just on the point of drowning.

Something’s wrong, because it’s so often the job
that has you between its teeth, or on a short lead,
steady only in its domination,
always threatening to pitch you if you don’t behave,
whittling you down day by day and year by year
towards exhausted submission.

Better then to say: “It was a hefty job
that held her down for many years.”


Athena

Twice born: once from an insect and then
from your father’s head. It’s a strange start,
but when your pregnant mum was turned
into a beetle and consumed, then
you clearly needed to get birthed quick.

That must have been some journey from the swirling
gastric juices of Zeus to his complicated,
philandering grey matter. You made
some noise there, causing him a headache,
crashing your sword and shield together in his brain.
He called the blacksmith to axe his skull open
and there you were: full-grown and armoured,
ready to begin a life of strategy.

Despite all that, you were your dad’s favourite girl.
Protecting at first the hearth and home,
then diversifying into the arts of war,
but cleverly, not like that blood-thirsty Ares
with his shock and awe, you were far more canny.

No surprise then that you chose your favourites
carefully: Heracles who appreciated
help with thinking through his tasks; Jason favoured
with the Golden Fleece; Achilles who, after all,
despite the sulking, was so much more appealing
than Agamemnon; Odysseus with a cunning
to match your own; and the city, to which
you gave the silver-grey olive tree.

What a wise owl you turned out to be.




Ali Rowland is a poet and author from Northumberland. Her poetry is sometimes about her own mental health disability, and just as often about the world in general. She is assisted in her endeavours by a wonderful husband and a beautiful Border Terrier. Ali won the Hexham Poetry Competition in 2023 and was Runner Up in the Positive Images Poetry Competition. She has been published in Tabula Rasa: Poems by Women (Linen Press): Ten Poems of Kindness Vol. 2 (Candlestick Press), as well as a number of poetry magazines.

Two Poems by Jacqueline Jules

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ 1 Comment

Dear Son

Sorting through thirty years
of what to keep and what to toss,
I keep thinking of you, son,
three hundred miles away
in a busy house with three kids.

If I left all this for you,
you’d drive down without
your wife and sit for hours,
legs crossed on the carpet
sifting through receipts, searching
for items you remember, the faded
papers sticking to your fingers.

Your father was a hoarder, too.

All it took was a single photograph
hidden in a nest of dental bills
to declare a whole box must be saved.

Old maps from family trips,
my lesson plans from 1998,
a blue ribbon from a spelling bee.

You don’t need to haul them home,
store them in your attic the way
your father did when his mother died.

Each bag I remove from this house,
releases you from the grief of letting go.


Because Her Poodle Died

She says she met her husband
because her poodle died.

A Miniature. Cancer. Nine years old.

Dead. So no need to rush home
to fasten his rhinestone leash for a walk.

Her poodle died, and she couldn’t face
not seeing his wiggling white butt
when she opened the door, not hearing
the click of his nails on the tile.

So she went to a bar with that group
from the office who gathered
every Friday night at five.

And Marvin was there. At the next table.
Somehow, their eyes met.

An ordinary tale, she admits,
before going on to say
they just moved to the suburbs
with a baby and two Beagle puppies.




Jacqueline Jules is the author of Manna in the Morning (Kelsay Books, 2021) and Itzhak Perlman’s Broken String, winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize from Evening Street Press. Her poetry has appeared in over 100 publications including The Sunlight Press, Gyroscope Review, One Art, and Amethyst Review. She is also the author of two poetry books for young readers, Tag Your Dreams: Poems of Play and Persistence. (Albert Whitman, 2020) and Smoke at the Pentagon: Poems to Remember (Bushel & Peck, 2023). Visit her at www.jacquelinejules.com.

Two Poems by Lynn White

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Stitching Together

There’s no fabric under the foot
and the machine isn’t plugged in.
It doesn’t need to be now.

She’s dreaming of her treadle
and the hand turned one.
Both dressed her
in her youth
cheaply
and sometimes
eccentrically.

She reads a note from the past
a piece of paper
a tiny fragment
but full of awakened dreams.

She thinks of that girl
sitting there sewing
then.
And now
stitching together
pieces
of a life
well lived
making
a patchwork
of her time.


Like Father Like Son

I wanted to be like my father,
to follow in his footsteps,
or rather,
his wheel-steps
as he drove his tram along the shiny rails.

We played the game constantly to give me practice
but I couldn’t quite get the hang of driving.
I was scared of crashing and tumbling on to the city streets.

So he bought me a Conductors uniform
and a bag for the money and tickets.
He drove and I sold the tickets.
It was a good compromise.

I think about it now as I look down on the city,
with its streets and green spaces
which no longer have trams.

“Like Father Like Son” first appeared in Verse Virtual.




Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and a Rhysling Award. Find her on her blog or on Facebook.

Two Poems by Miriam Maglani

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Paper Weight

They float in a perfect cube of clear resin,
a set of US mint coins from 1994.
He kept it on a dusty shelf
in his doctor’s office, next to the penguin
wearing a beret I sculpted for him.

We would take family trips to flea markets
so he could look for coins,
dollars, half dollars, nickels, pennies, silver, copper —

he felt their weight and contours
in his deft surgeon hands,
the coins preserved, frozen in time,
memories of a time long gone,

a reminder and remainder of him
and the unquantifiable weight of his loss.


Metal on Bone

When my mom’s friend Arthritis brewed
a storm in her knees,
the simple everyday task
of flushing the toilet made her fall.

She was found crumpled
on her bathroom floor
like balled up toilet paper.

X-rays and scans unearthed
her injury— a break in her femur.

She has metal in her now —
her organic existence compromised
with rods and screws that will join her
in her earthy grave.

Her family has faith in the skill of surgeons,
the fidelity of screws,
the strength of metal,
her mettle,
for the long journey to recovery
that stretches barren before her.

They pray she will be able to walk again,
metal on bone,
bone with mettle.




Miriam Manglani lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and three children. She works full-time as a Sr. Technical Training Manager. Her poems have been published in various magazines and journals including Red Eft Review, One Art, Glacial Hills Review, Paterson Literary Review, and Lothlorian Poetry Journal.