Monthly Archives: May 2021

PULLING WEEDS FROM THE CRACKS IN MY BRICK SIDEWALK 
        
In early April,
after a hard rain,
 
I spent an entire
afternoon pulling
 
weeds from the cracks
in my brick sidewalk.
 
I have my doubts 
about how useful
 
this will be 
since the weeds,
 
like my deep-rooted 
sins, always return.
 
I have tried everything, 
even toxic weed killers,
 
without success.
It might be months, 
 
but the weeds 
always return,
 
mocking my
foolish effort.  
 
I use a trimmer
to hold them at bay, 
 
but modern technology 
can only do so much.
 
Since it is spring and
a time for a new start,
 
I ask for the strength
to make an exchange: 
 
My weak faith will gain
the weeds' strong persistence
 
while my steadfast sins
will gain my many doubts.

Harold Whisman is a retired English and journalism teacher for Norfolk Public Schools in Virginia.  In his “golden years” he helps babysit his grandchildren for their working parents and writes poetry.  He finds both jobs often frustrating but also very rewarding.  His poems have been published in Ancient Paths and Better than Starbucks literary magazines.

After John Muir 
 
I will fuse spirit skies. 
I will touch naked God. 
 
I will span ancient hues. 
I will wrap silent cries. 
 
I will grasp holy breath. 
I will burn holy scents. 
 
I will chant unknown hymns. 
I will dance empty steps. 
 
I will bless magic trees. 
I will call mythic birds. 
 
I will push mountain streams. 
I will fill mirrored lakes. 
 
I will name countless tides. 
I will stride endless shores. 
 
I will spin nightly orbs. 
I will toss diamond stars. 
 
I will stoke brother son. 
I will fan sister moon. 
 
I will look with my heart. 
I will sing from my soul. 
 
I will spin endless poems. 
I will keep quiet tears.
 
I will ache soundless joy. 
I will weave glory days. 
 
I will fuse spirit skies. 
I will know what I know. 
 
I will touch naked God. 
I will be what I am.
 

Barry T. Brodie is a poet, playwright, actor, director and teacher.  He has written two books:  The Language of the Star – Journals of the Magi and Tom Thomson – On the Threshold of Magic (Black Moss Press).  He is a co-founder of Shō Arts Studio in Windsor, Ontario.  He teaches a course on the creative process at the University of Windsor.

 
Lot’s Wife (II)
 
A white requiem of promises reaches me—
you’re finally here 
who have been traveling since before I can remember 
 
and you come bearing his flag 
which, distracted by the wind for a moment, 
reminds me of your facial tick.
 
To your eyes I am immobile—
veined stone with a shock of hair, 
monolith whose pauses between speech 
rare enough to be oracular
cement your view of the scene: 
 
one square of an ancient codex
with a border of human blood 
that offers an order 
 
to read 
how birds and flowers outstretch 
the sun 
 
how like a pillar of salt, nothing about me prevails 
but everything remembers. 

David Capps is a philosophy professor at Western Connecticut State University. He is the author of three chapbooks: Poems from the First Voyage (The Nasiona Press, 2019), A Non-Grecian Non-Urn (Yavanika Press, 2019), and Colossi (Kelsay Books, 2020). He lives in New Haven, CT.

Vespers of the Cat
 
Settling of a summer afternoon
The cat catches olive branch shade
Stretches along the flagstones
Provides its own cushioning
 
Moment’s wholeness in the long cat’s head
Forming an instant into a twinkling globe
Forgets about the morning
Neglects a sense of limit
 
Little eternity out of a heavy day
Accepting of radiance by the grateful cat
Blinks in the tinted breezes
Dozes cosmos cradled

Martin Potter (https://martinpotterpoet.home.blog) is a poet and academic, and his poems have appeared in Acumen, The French Literary Review, Eborakon, Scintilla, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Poetry Village, andother journals. His pamphlet In the Particular was published by Eyewear in December, 2017. 

Explaining the Rainbow
 
The moon needs no footnotes or praise
nor does the rainbow whose beauty
 
silences thunder. Thales it is said
tripped and fell while studying stars.
 
Anaximander introduced the infinite
as the beginnings of all. Anaximenes
 
concerned himself with the behavior of
earth, the sun ~ and explaining the rainbow.
 
Poets thought the stream of colors 
across the sky the goddess Iris.
 
And children busy playing
disturb timelessness with their giggles.

Barbara Alfaro is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award for her play Dos Madres and the IndieReader Discovery Award for Best Memoir for her memoir Mirror Talk. Her poems have appeared in various journals including Poet Lore, Variant Literature, and Glassworks. Her poetry collection, Catbird, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. http://www.BarbaraAlfaro.net

Sudden Blue
 After Psalm 139

Is this the furthest ocean
the final arms where all gulls glide
 
Is this the sudden blue where
whales bathe and hear their song in first stereo
 
Is this the shore where
I should always stand surrendered to stardust
 
Should I walk these sands
until muscle gives out at last
 
as if I ever had control at all
as if I ever knew why I moved the way I do
 
There is nothing to look for deeper
than the endurance running toward me
 
What do we wait for
not already waiting for us?
 
What aches to outstretch to you
and see you as you have never been seen?
 
Would you meet wonder on the corner,
carrying nothing, as if your whole search for eternity
could flicker under a lamppost
 
How gorgeous to be greeted
without words
And to step into night
as confident as wings
 
No longer gathering the will
to outfly the moon

Clint King is an American poet. Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, he graduated from Miami University, with a double major in History and Political Science, and a minor in American Literature. He lives in California, where he is at work on a collection of poems and his debut novel.

light & fire 
2 Chron.3.8
 
do not fear       death as death—
long watery arms, placid 
                        Prussian blue—will touch
your {lightbody} 
 
touch a password to {lightcube}
 —20 by 20 by 20—dis-
                        integrating inside light & fire,
beside other lightbodies, figures 
 
in divine presence singing
ballads of transposition
                        —clay to sinew to sanctuary—how
bodies of {fleshwater} found
 
each {other} assuaged 
fear of annihilation & rebirth. 
                        death brushes the implacable
vision of becoming, the falling
 
sparrow dreams—breaking shell, breaking 
wing in her fall—the {lightfix} 
                        of her still orbs—full tilt to sun—
 
unblinking under the greater orange orb, under
what would {otherwise}
                        blind, what would burn.
 

Kathryn Knight Sonntag is the author of the poetry collection The Tree at the Center (BCC Press, 2019). She has recent and forthcoming poems in Psaltery & Lyre, Abstract Magazine, The Curator, and the anthology Blossom as the Cliffrose (Torrey House Press, 2021). She works as a landscape architect in Salt Lake City, Utah. www.kathrynknightsonntag.com

After the fire
     -a reflection on Notre Dame Cathedral
 
You seemed to grow
from the marrow of Earth, 
bones of limestone rising
in gothic glory to pierce the sky,
built of  rock, but lifted
by faith that could wield 
logic and harness reason in an age 
when ecstasy was still possible.
You withstood the assaults
of time and nature and humankind 
for eight centuries, only to be ignited 
by a present-day spark.
Now your charred walls gaze 
on a wilderness of rubble; 
your ethereal stained-glass light
is boarded-off and common sunshine 
floods your nave through a broken vault;
the cool, rational logic
of your architecture is threatened
by a claw of mangled scaffolding.
 
Today it is cranes that pierce the sky,
skinny arms hovering 
over a patient on life support,
state-of-the-art machinery nursing 
what modern technology injured. 
Those cutting-edge tools
will clear the rubble and clean the walls, 
repair the roof and reinstall the stained glass,
but they can’t revive
the soaring joy that lifted stones 
into leaping arches and imagined 
that light could be holy. 
The radiant faith that could create 
your hallowed space is near to collapse, 
weakened by rampant reason,
scorched by blazing skepticism,
swaying beneath a claw of doubt.                            

Karen Ulm Rettig has a Fine Arts degree and began writing poetry when in her 30s. She is a member of Cincinnati Writers’ Project and has published one book, titled Finding God: Our Quest for a Deity and the Dragons We Meet On the Way. Find her online at karenulmrettig.com.

Two Men in White Address Them
Acts 1:11
 
Why do you stand here looking at the sky?
Are you amazed as river passes by,
keeps on moving from the hidden past
into the hidden future, yet stays steadfast,
revealed, in front of you—or do you drink,
face in the water, kneeling on the brink,
refreshed by the real presence of the stream?
If you should notice in your walking dream
a brief caesura between wind and wind,
a shift where atmosphere has slowed and thinned, 
do you lose your mind to grief, do you despair
of ever again feeling the stir of air—
or do you know, nearly from your birth, 
that wind is with us always? On this earth,
being, leaving, returning: all are the same
for river, wind, and Christ, whose holy name
on your lips can raise the dead. We laugh at you,
but mean it kindly. If you only knew.

Jane Greer founded Plains Poetry Journal, an advance guard of the New Formalism movement, in 1981, and edited it until 1993. She has two collections of poetry, Bathsheba on the Third Day (The Cummington Press, 1986), and Love like a Conflagration (Lambing Press, 2020) and lives in North Dakota.

Implorations
 
Let others not whip with words
assault me with their arrogance. 
May the chart of course 
be as easy
as is achievable. 
Steer me, Lord of lords
to be my finest rendition: 
where anger and ego 
are absent, 
where avarice 
has no base, 
where the core 
is connected to you.

Sanjeev Sethi is published in over thirty countries. His poems have found a home in more than 350 journals, anthologies, or online literary venues. Bleb a Wee Book from Dreich in Scotland is slated for June 2021 release. Wrappings in Bespoke is joint-winner of Full Fat Collection Competition-Deux organized by The Hedgehog Poetry Press UK. It is his fifth collection. It will be launched in late 2021. He lives in Mumbai, India.