They point away from where I’m jogging to
as I lean head down straight into the gale
as if against it. Just exactly who
I think I am, they seem to know, these frail
cat stalks and blades, cotton-pods, shreds
and tufts of which, kachooed across the path,
bank along neglected flower beds.
Pushing on in all this aftermath
of hot green afternoons that now survive
as memories of grass and sun and song
and everything unthinkingly alive,
this is my one way left of being strong
and I will argue it against the wind
in stride, and striving, and undisciplined.

 

 

Terence Culleton is a former Bucks County (PA) Poet Laureate, a 2019 Pushcart Prize nominee, and recipient of First Honorable Mention in the 2019 Helen Schaible International Traditional Sonnet Contest. Terence has published two collections of formally crafted narrative and lyric poems, A Communion of Saints (2011) and Eternal Life (2015), both with Anaphora Literary Press. Poems from his forthcoming collection of sonnets, A Tree and Gone (FutureCycle Press), have recently appeared in Antiphon, The Lyric, The Eclectic Muse, Innisfree, The Road Not Taken (including Feature Poem), Blue Unicorn Review, and Raintown Review. 

His days are done and nights have claimed his breath,
As crickets lull truncated lives to rest;
His fragile dreams now fled were never blessed
But may he find eternal life in death.

The flowers grow and wither year by year,
And thorny stalks then grace this ground in awe;
Whose deep endearment dare invite the thaw?
Where every bead of snow’s a frozen tear.

The gravestone reads, ‘The songs of heart will die,
The feelings come to mould, and love to dust;
A sole, unwilling sigh to bid goodbye
Can wreck my pleasant sleep beneath the crust.

If someone’s loss reminds him, words betray,
Unread his book of fame can’t add a page;
My dormant lines won’t ever let him stray,
And soothe the blows of fortune’s deadly rage.’

There lies his tombstone marred by disregard,
While dappled moonlight shines upon the bard.

 

 

Satyananda Sarangi is a young civil servant by profession. A graduate in electrical engineering from IGIT Sarang, his works have been featured in The Society of Classical Poets, Snakeskin, Page & Spine, Glass: Facets of Poetry, WestWard Quarterly, The GreenSilk Journal and elsewhere. Currently, he resides in Odisha, India.

We age with grit and sometimes grace.
As time and wisdom forge our face,
We rest assured that it will show
A life well lived on earth’s plateau.
But when I see the mirror’s truth,
That lost geography of youth,
With East and West now shifting South,
And tighter lines around my mouth,
A Northern pole of thinning hair—
Recalling Prufrock’s unasked dare—
I know that image staring back
Cannot be me. No, not that wrack.
No topographical relief
Can shake my firmly held belief
That no tectonic shift that vast
Could so unterraform my past.

I know my zenith lies ahead
Beyond those fault zones I now dread.
Perhaps some glowing distant star
Will offer me an avatar.
My molecules transmogrified,
My mind now free to be my guide,
I’ll soar, defying time and space,
My ashes resting in their vase.

 

Maurice O’Sullivan, a former teamster, jail guard and pub owner, is an award-winning teacher, editor, columnist, and film maker who lives in Orlando, Florida. His most recent book, Have You Not Hard of Floryda, is a survey of 300 years of Florida’s colonial literature.

The wind is much too high not to remind
the shutters of their winter’s worth of speech,
which they revive today as if to find
the one conclusion they all failed to reach
in their crude chatter-clash against the siding
throughout the tedious months. Who’d listen now
as logic yields to bird-song? Such confiding
relies on atmospherics anyhow.
Against the sudden flowers red and blue
it seems a cavil. Winter’s nihilism,
compelling to the eye, turns hardly true
when May converts the eye to solipsism,
that kind cradle-rock of prayer and song
that can’t be, by its own light, ever wrong.

 

 

Terence Culleton is a former Bucks County (PA) Poet Laureate, a 2019 Pushcart Prize nominee, and recipient of First Honorable Mention in the 2019 Helen Schaible International Traditional Sonnet Contest. Terence has published two collections of formally crafted narrative and lyric poems, A Communion of Saints (2011) and Eternal Life (2015), both with Anaphora Literary Press. Poems from his forthcoming collection of sonnets, A Tree and Gone (FutureCycle Press), have recently appeared in Antiphon, The Lyric, The Eclectic Muse, Innisfree, The Road Not Taken (including Feature Poem), Blue Unicorn Review, and Raintown Review. 

Twenty one summers later, I found him again,
Traces of familiarity bloomed; one brought
Me a glimpse of children savouring candy floss,
Others drew me close to informal songs I sought
To learn from his classic collection often thought
As plain; each composition in itself a train
Of emotions halted by ear-shattering clangs
Of the school bell. A broad, triumphant smile across
His sun-kissed face, his clothes without the slightest stain
Betrayed his customers; and an every-day loss
Became the price of kindness, selling free of cost
In exchange of happy, bubbling faces around.
And his neatly-crafted songs, untouched by the pangs
Of hunger, of meagre livelihood, of years lost
In spreading a wave of benevolent love, still sound
The same, merrier than all words I’ve ever crossed.

 

 

Satyananda Sarangi is a young civil servant by profession. A graduate in electrical engineering from IGIT Sarang, his works have been featured in The Society of Classical Poets, Snakeskin, Page & Spine, Glass: Facets of Poetry, WestWard Quarterly, The GreenSilk Journal and elsewhere. Currently, he resides in Odisha, India.

Point Reyes, California

Waking up, remembering where I am,
I try to get my bearings as I stand.

The brown pelicans shadow broken waves,
while snowy plovers dart along the strand.

Staring out at a fraction of an ocean,
glancing down at a million grains of sand,

I let my eyes adjust to what’s around me,
and shake the nap I’d only halfway planned.

originally appeared in The Wild Geography of Misplaced Things (White Violet Press, 2013)

David Rosenthal lives in Berkeley, California, and works as a teacher and instructional coach in the Oakland Unified School District. His poems and translations have appeared in Rattle, Teachers & Writers Magazine, Birmingham Poetry Review, Measure, Raintown Review, Unsplendid, and many other print and online journals. He has been a Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award Finalist and a Pushcart Prize Nominee. His collection, The Wild Geography of Misplaced Things, was released by Kelsay Books in 2013.

A gloss on the following lines from “The Eolian Harp”
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

Methinks it should have been impossible
Not to love all things in a world so filled;
Where the breeze warbles and the mute still air
Is Music slumbering on her instrument.

Methinks it should have been impossible
Not to feel the rhythm of the spheres,
The joyous music of the Lord’s which still
In undertones so permeates our ears–

Methinks it should have been impossible
Not to love all things in a world so filled
With symphonies of His created score
With chords so firm and melody that’s trilled

By every living thing that we adore–
Not to love all things in a world so filled
Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air
Is but the pause before the music swells

Again in great crescendo of our prayer
Of praise to Him from everyone who dwells
Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air
Is Music slumbering on her instrument

In dreams of the eternal song to Him
Who orchestrates the harmonies He meant
To elevate our souls–our silent hymn
Is Music slumbering on her instrument.

 

 

Dr. Emory D. Jones is a retired English teacher who taught in Cherokee Vocational High School in Cherokee, Alabama, for one year, Northeast Alabama State Junior College for four years, Snead State Junior College in Alabama for three years, and Northeast Mississippi Community College for thirty-five years. He has published poems in such journals as Voices International, The White Rock Review, Free Xpressions Magazine, The Storyteller, Modern Poetry Quarterly Review, Gravel, Pasques Petals, The Pink Chameleon, and Encore: Journal of the NFSPS. He is retired and lives in Iuka, Mississippi, with his wife, Glenda. He has two daughters and four grandchildren.

“I once met a man who had walked on the moon.”
That’s the start of an essay, and I’m not immune
to its essence, explaining how, for many writers,
“Imposter Syndrome” makes us feel like outsiders.

I’m sure this is true for whatever you do;
there may be exceptions, but probably few.
I don’t belong here as an author of verse,
but I’ll keep on writing, for better (and worse)—

or maybe I do, though I don’t feel that way.
I’m used to it now; happens most every day.
The greatest among us is also the least
in some way or other and though we all feast

on these gifts, they’re not evenly spread ’midst our bones
nor ’posited equally throughout all zones.
It seems that some people get more than fair share
while most of us feel we’re left out as an heir.

But each has some talent, so seek what’s inside.
Let’s use them to complement, not to divide.
When someone amazing encounters your space,
don’t run off and hide in your reticent place.

Consider they, too, may have some fear of you,
feeling they don’t belong—they can’t do what you do!
We’re in this together. Let’s give it our best;
even though we’re all different, we’re all like the rest.

 

Note: Inspired by Neil Gaiman’s comments, shared on Facebook by Aerogramme Writers’ Studio, about his encounter with Neil Armstrong at an event where the astronaut felt like he didn’t belong in a group teaming with “artists and scientists, writers and discoverers.”

 

 

Ken Gosse prefers writing short, rhymed verse with traditional meter, usually filled with whimsy and humor. First published in First Literary Review–East in November 2016, his poems are also in The Offbeat, Pure Slush, Parody, Home Planet News Online, Eclectica, and other publications. Raised in the Chicago suburbs, now retired, he and his wife have lived in Mesa, AZ, over twenty years.

I saw a spider and let her live
As though her life were mine to give
Or take away.

Heat’s what brings her out of hiding,
Secretive no longer, gliding
On the silken fluids she spins.

Gossamer geometries, suspended,
Hidden in her body, quiet, splendid,
Flutter in the evening breeze.

 

 

 

Mrs. Hidley has been writing prose and poetry for her own amusement and that of her family and friends and others for most of her 73 years. And one of her ten grandchildren is named Kalliope. She has lived in Walla Walla, Washington; Frankfurt and Bremerhaven, Germany; Upper New York State; Enid, Oklahoma; Montgomery and Prattville, Alabama; Lubbock, Texas; Dover, Delaware; West Palm Beach, Florida; Goose Bay, Labrador; Washington, D.C.; Fairfield, California; Omaha, Nebraska; and now resides in Ojai (Nest-of-the-Moon), California, where she continues to write.