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Snowfall on Opening Leaf Buds: Sonnet

Guides do appear, almost invisible,
Flickering through the grass beside the path,             
Or glimpsed flying through a gentle snowfall
On opening leaf-buds, when the season’s growth                  
Seems to halt for an hour. Who are they, though,      
These guides? Afterwards we thoughtlessly talk                   
About them as ...dreams more fragile than snow                   
Falling only to melt. So can we walk             
In the direction they have taken, doubting
Whether it is direction or mere aimless
Wandering round in circles? Will we find
Anything anywhere? Silence is shouting
At us: “Look up. Look down. Look back. The nameless
Wonder is here. Oh why are you so blind?”

Leo Aylen was born in KwaZulu, South Africa, was educated in England and has lived in London, New York, LA. He has 5 prizes, about 100 poems in anthologies, 100 broadcast,  9 collections published, the latest The Day The Grass Came, called “a triumph”  by Melvyn Bragg, “Stupendous” by Simon Callow, “An energy which could leave readers gasping” by Martyn Halsall. He often writes in strict forms.

Huldah Prophesies (a Premature but Peaceful Death for the Beloved King of Judah)
            ~II Kings 22:14–20 & II Chronicles 34: 22-28
 
My name is nothing to brag about—
its origin akin to vermin, 
weasel or mole—imagine naming
your daughter that!—though I do dig 
beneath the meanings of things. 
 
Messengers and priests visit me often
here in the Mishneh, the new quarter
where business booms and the western wall 
rises. I’ve grown accustomed to their nagging 
questions, their desire to hear from on high
arduous answers. And today, four men—
               Hilkiah, the high priest, 
               Shaphan, the scribe, 
               Asaiah, the king’s servant,
               Ahikam, and Akbor—
like horses in the future apocalypse— 
came to me (not my cousin
Jeremiah), the wife of the royal 
wardrobe’s keeper, I, who sift serial facts 
from fictional chaff, who can offer  
mercy for the king who’s just discovered
his nation’s sins. 
                                 What can I say?  
Amid my lesson to the young 
women in my house, the men galloped in,
breathless, their voices braying, 
brows caked with dust and the sweat 
of urgency. They’d found a book
buried beneath precious metal 
hidden in the temple. I tell you 
it doesn’t get any better than this. 
And I was the one who knew 
whether it was the word of G-d.
 
I sent the women home, 
then took a look. 
                                 Sh'ma Yisrael,
yes, listen, my tongue intoned, 
eyeing these men who studied Hebrew texts 

 
incomplete until today. They were obeying
orders, pulverizing idols, repairing the breaches 
of the temple, the couplings and roof-beams 
desecrated, when they found the terrifying treasure.
 
Tell this man, I said, for I knew Josiah was
created from clay like me. Mine was the voice 
of Yahweh that rose above the masculine crowd. 
I sometimes didn’t recognize its commanding 
pitch and tenor, its throaty insistence on decrees
and divinations. No one could keep it
down. 
               Tell him the nation will fall. 
 
Eleh haDevarim, these are His words. Curses! 
Curses. You and I will see it all 
before we die. The men’s necks
tightened, their mouths filled with speech-
less fear. An owl on the roof howled. 
I who am chosen of Adonai
to speak these hard truths
took one necessary breath.
Then, beyond anyone’s imagination,
came the rest.
 
 

A Best of the Net and six-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Julie L. Moore is the author of four poetry collections, including, most recently, Full Worm Moon, which won a 2018 Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Award and received honorable mention for the Conference on Christianity and Literature’s 2018 Book of the Year Award. She has also had poetry appear in African American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Image, New Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review. Moore is the Writing Center Director at Taylor University in Indiana, where she is the poetry editor for Relief Journal. Learn more about her work at julielmoore.com.

In the Beginning

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
Genesis 1:1 

We are told
by those who claim
such knowledge that the universe
is still expanding: Matter since creation
lunges further, further into the abyss we fathom
only as theory, redefining space, fragments charged
by echoes of first cause altering time in swelling symmetry,
invading void with power and glory, bejeweling the nightscape
until (some say) nebulae turn inward again and retreat to home,
colliding, collapsing into the dark vortex of their fiery origin,
tightening focus, drawn into negative space, the tiny
mass vanishing at the sound of a faint crunch
when, again, a spark strikes the urge
of a fresh heartbeat.

James Green has published four chapbooks of poetry, the most recent of which was named winner of the Charles Dickson Chapbook contest sponsored by the Georgia Poetry Society. Individual poems have appeared in literary magazines in Ireland, the UK, and the USA.   Formerly a university professor and administrator, he is now retired and resides in Muncie, Indiana. You may contact him through his website at www.jamesgreenpoetry.com.

Meadow
 
Time departs on air
dandy clocks
spread their hands
fine fingers, feather weight 
 
            float     out       of         v     i     e      w
swept up on unseen drafts
into crisp sky-light
lost to the blue
 
eyes cast higher
to follow 
the haphazard path
of a dancing seed
 
a cat chasing butterflies
weaves senseless loops
children           leap     and clap
at rising soap bubbles
 
random acts of joy
in organised shapes
beauty in non-conformity
that hides mathematical certainty
 
be more like a petal
on the breath of a summer's day
let airstreams guide you –                   soar. 
                                                                        Trust.
 

KC Bailey is a writer from the UK. Publication credits for poetry, fiction and non-fiction include The Ekphrastic Review, The Hellebore, Black Bough Poetry, Monkey Kettle, The Tide Rises, Black Flowers, The Failure Baler, Idle Ink, CaféLit and the BBC. She has an MA in Creative Writing and Tweets @KCBailey_Writer.

Lament for Lost Things


I have found a place
where stray ferns link
long-fingered fronds
high above steep, damp verges
and below, in fuss and foam,
a stream emerges.
But sometimes from
the hurrying water
breaks a shy, jagged thought
born of the ravine, 
not sought:
a jutting fragment
offspring of the river bed,
aslant, no doubt
slippery to tread
and bearing the broken edge
of a voice 
that once I heard. 
After that, nothing, 
not a shiver,
not a word
just the steady spill
of all known things
down a shadowed bank
for who now sings
the scattering of stone
and feathered rock,            
and memory
and mark?

Annie Kissack is a teacher from the Isle of Man. A fluent speaker of Manx Gaelic, she enjoys singing and writing music for her choir, but only began writing poetry in the last few years, becoming the Fifth Manx Bard in 2018. facebook @anniekissackpoetry

Celestial Time
Clocks circle in the sky
The sun ladles out the day
And the moon parses through the night
 
Great and small wheels 
Jig and whirl
Spinning time from space
The Milky Way is 
The sky’s water clock
 
Eons pass 
And the frothy world churns
 
At the end 
Comets are deva tears
Witnessing the collapse
Light nests in darkness
 
Later
 
Brahma wakens with a start!
Yawning OM
The world is created anew
 
Stars exhale
Dust congeals 
And life jumbles to a silent beat
 
In time 
Intelligence holds a thumb up to the sky
The moon is pregnant again
 
In each creation
The Vedas unfurl to reveal the truth
Stars and planets
Mark off time and fate
Like clockwork

Keith Burton graduated from Brown University with a major in psychology and a minor in English. As a professional musician, his love of poetry helped him write songs and lyrical cadences continue to interest him. He honors all faiths and is fascinated by their intersection.

Souvenir
 
I usually cry about my mother 
in the bathtub with the door locked. 
Not a slow, pretty tear that could be 
confused for water or sweat— 
but a jagged sob, a long moan. 
I rest my forehead on the cool rim. 
Try to catch my breath but only
manage a ragged sucking of air.
My cat’s worried, claws at the door 
to sing to me, do her silly dance: distract me. 
I let her in. My body quickly returns 
to its hot, wet fold. I’m grateful 
for the headache I'll have tomorrow.
Exhaustion is the closest prayer I know.
 

Melanie Figg is the author of the award-winning poetry collection, Trace. She is a recent NEA Fellowship winner and her poems and essays are published widely. As a certified professional coach, she offers workshops and writing retreats and works remotely with writers on their work and their creative process. www.melaniefigg.net

This Room, This Chair
 
If I come to this room, this chair
each evening post dinner and light the way
for words to appear, there is no guarantee,
no change of the night’s direction
but still it is the only way I can pray.
 
Like a clockwork spring
the key in the crown is just a part
of a larger mechanism.
 
If I knew what my life was for or 
if there was a grid to guide my hand
then maybe these lines are for what
draws the mind out of its hiding place
and that alone aligns with a faith
worth puzzling over.

Elisabeth Weiss teaches writing at Salem State University, in Salem, Massachusetts. She’s published poems in London’s Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, the Birmingham Poetry Review, the Paterson Literary Review and many other journals. Lis won the Talking Writing Hybrid Poetry Prize for 2016. Her chapbook, The Caretaker’s Lament, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2016. 

Arbor

In the language of 
                  raindrops
 
lilting on fern-bellied leaves
a jacaranda is conversing with the sea
 
filigree branches weave words into mist
                  & blossom into questions, lost 
 
in translation by the tides. Answers come not
by way of the clouds,
 
         but in threading the filaments of rain
 
in this ancient art of seeking & weaving,
we are wrought & weathered
 
ready to brace the weight
of a thundering sky

Jenevieve Carlyn Hughes teaches humanities for university students. Her poetry has recently appeared in Northern New England Review’s Front/Lines: Pandemic Perspectives, Braided Way Magazine, and the Connecticut River Review, among other places. She enjoys birdwatching, rarely with binoculars. Follow her on Instagram @sea_thistle.

Rilke Phone Case
 
 
I guess this is my version
Of the way you felt you held Louise Labé, like
You had to translate her
Poems into the “universal” language of
Martyrdom, working from that big
Volume of her Oeuvres
Published in 1887 Paris by——lol——Charles
Boy, a category maybe we both have
A strained/strange/syncopated
Relationship with. People call your
Versions “overtranslated” now, like death
Entered their country of love
But they were important enough
To be notified——
 
& look at how Messiaen scored his birdsong,
Scanner imperfections like tape hiss but still
Plenty of information for us to hear
Their myriad colors, the songs imbued
Wetly with them like 10,000 embarrassing tears
Or the water of which just a little
Was needed to render you in watercolor
Little Modernist aberration your eye
Looking a bruised yellow green
Blue reddish-brown (I had to ask
Kristi to be sure, colorblind as
I am, just 
Like I’d ask her for some music words about
The Louange
 
To make me sound like a smarter bird
About it. Intervals, yes, & the bizarre
Instrumentation fueled by carceral scarcity
Like it was screaming No one would do this
This way
If they didn’t have to the cello telling
These difficult truths in its almost-human
Voice are there any recordings of you
I wonder——a quick google makes it appear
Not, even though you lived
Until 1926 you were never a song
On a cylinder of wax
No nightingale
Outsang you in the flat background)
 
Like a complicated dress that goes
With basically nothing,
Stands almost only on its own
But of course you have to be in it
Or me,
Whatever history
Dictates through lipstick
& the kind of makeup routine
You’d manage if you were brave enough
To act, less camera & more
Commedia with its multitude
Of histrionic colors
Pouncing all Brakhage on the frame
(O how you would’ve understood each other)
 
There are no angels in Labé. The whites of
Their countless eyes could not suffice to
Contain the debate between
Folly &
Love
As it lives on in the play of color,
Its characters
Leaning toward or away from the moon
Like a giant gray (Kristi’s asleep
So I had to google “what color is the moon”)
Camera
Beaming down on Labé’s
Brave costume 
Or the light between buildings
 
In Sonnet 24 (go ahead go read it)
Shakespeare paints this light between
Two people, an angelology
Of distance——where your true image
pictured lies——& god
Can’t you just imagine a
Hilbert-hotel-walk-in-closet
On the head of a pin totally stacked
With beautiful clothes Rilke your white collars
To lead the angels out of the paintings 
Louise’s jodhpurs her riding boots &
Rope Arlecchino’s many-colored tights &
The simple outfit Messiaen
Wore to the church organ each Sunday
 
I don’t think you ever translated William
The way you liturgized our Lionnoize rider 
People like to say you & he had an
Inverted relationship
To the human, him using it to figure
The non- & you preferring the other
Direction, trying
To share the notes every other thing
On god’s great supervenience ladder
Would give us in our many scenes
& does give us, whether we take them
Or can even read them or hear them or not,
A bird scrawling on the Angelic Doctor’s script
Try it with a little more wind here
 
A little more blue in the eye
Kristi’s still sleeping but not even she
Can help me as I google “what color were
Rilke’s eyes” no one thought to write it out &
The b&w photographs are no help
Paula Moderson-Becker’s portrait (I mistyped
“poetrait” first, ha) is all I have to go on
But we already learned two stanzas ago
How painters lie
They are not like birds they have
Ugly motives sometimes
Hearts that scar
& paints that, though they could mix to get
Your eye color right, might not on purpose
 
Full flower five the ivy climbs
Five stories not a single overlapping
Plot line node petiole axillary bud
buriest thy content I didn’t know
Those little Koch snowflake spikes
On the leaves were called teeth
They chew through landlords’ mortar
Admirably & the birds eat the bugs
Spider mites aphids scale and mealy
Feeding on the leaves pretend we
Needed any more than soap & water
To rinse off the mites a certainty
I think you would’ve loved baptism
Of lighter underside & stomata 
 
& clean bird feet from which to pitch
A song
Yvonne
Loriod’s XIV. Regard des anges
From the Vingt regards
New stars falling like hammers
Trombone flames of angels ripped through
With jealousy
Not having been trusted with love
The greatest eccentricities of which
Are a letting-be
Of the music in your bird head
Your bird head
d. 17 May 2010
 

Tom Snarsky teaches mathematics at Malden High School in Malden, Massachusetts, USA. His collection Light-Up Swan will be published in 2021 by Ornithopter Press