Amethyst Review

Marcescent Leaves

Snow is only on mountain peaks;
their sides are brown, most trees barren.
Oak leaves stay on low branches;
slow wind turns them east. Lake also
flows slowly, like our slowing,
our white hair, old clinging.
These dry leaves still hold their form,
some function serve though green is gone.
What life they have is all that’s known―
tree, water, blue sky, birds and lake,
to stay in this strange paradise
until harsh message sent―release.
Oak tree slowly frees the leaf;
our bodies take the spirit.

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Joan M. Howard’s poetry has appeared  in  the Aurorean,  Lucid Rhythms, The Road Not Taken: The Journal of Formal Poetry, The Deronda Review, Victorian Violet  Press,  POEM, The Wayfarer, Mezzo Cammin and other literary journals. She has written two books: Death and Empathy: My Sister Web in 2017 and  Jack, Love, and the Daily Grail  published by Kelsay Books. Joan is a former teacher with an MA in German and English Literature and is a member of the North Carolina Writers’ Network (www.netwestwriters.blogspot.com) and Georgia Poetry Society, She enjoys birding and kayaking on the beautiful waters of Lake Chatuge near Hiawassee.

In Praise of Oceans –

white crests leaping for heaven
only to surge on shores with rock, with shell
to spume again and then retreat.
The heave and swell, peak and trough of salt
licking skin, crusted dry under sun,
shedding onto towels striped and damp.
Praise be to seaweed somersaulting through coral,
threadfin spied and gripped by gulls
laughing across the draughts.
Praise to molecules of hydrogen and oxygen spinning
across grains of sand roving coast to coast
by rivers’ mouths, by marsh and mangrove,
from clouds blooming silver-gray over the horizon,
fog and mist smudging the sinking sun.

.

KB Ballentine’s sixth collection, The Light Tears Loose,
appeared this summer with Blue Light Press. Published in Crab Orchard
Review and Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, among others, her work also
appears in anthologies including Carrying the Branch: Poets in Search of
Peace (2017) and In Plein Air (2017). Learn more at
www.kbballentine.com.

MEDITATION ON RADIANCE SUTRA #77

I close the blinds to traffic on Harpersville,
trash people threw last night while passing.
Later I will pick up plastic cups and wrappers
from Sonic and McDonalds. Cigarette butts.

I open the blinds facing the reservoir, morning
light through the newly budding leaves. Some
call it scrub brush. I call it forest, the woods.

We take what is offered. Attempt to make
it our own. We are temporary. The parsonage:
Not a borrowed house, but an earned one.
When the choir director lived here, the living room
housed his practice organ.  Walls hold

vibrations. Yesterday, when waking from a deep sleep,
I heard the chords from a chorus of soft Amens.

Elaine Fletcher Chapman (formerly Elaine Walters McFerron) is the author of a volume of poems, RESERVOIR forthcoming with Saint Julian Press in late 2020, Hunger for Salt published by Saint Julian Press and a letterpress chapbook, Double Solitude published by Green River Press. She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor teaching Literature at Old Dominion University, Chapman worked on staff at The Bennington Writing Seminars, Bennington College for 18 years. She founded The Writer’s Studio where she teaches poetry, nonfiction and an ongoing class, On Keeping a Journal. She also provides editing services and organizes Poetry Readings and Crossing Over Writing Retreats.  For the last 39 years she has worked as a therapist in private practice. Also she is a Certified iRest Yoga Nidra Meditation teacher. She has poems forthcoming in Hoot Review, Cloudbank and Poetry Pacific. Her poems have been published in 8 Poems, Rabid Oak, The Tishman Review, The EcoTheo Review, The Cortland Review, Connotation, The Sun, Calyx, Poet Lore, 5AM, Salamander, and others. She was guest blogger on The Best American Poetry Blog and The Solstice Literary Magazine blog. She now lives on the West side of the Chesapeake Bay near the James River in Newport News, Virginia. She also spends a great deal of time in the San Francisco Bay area. Trailer and Poetry Videos for Hunger For Salt: www.vimeo.com/elainefletcherchapman or http://www.elainefletcherchapman

On Dartmoor

1. Princeton

Billowed mass of cloud door
light spilling
from its yellow threshold

onto the path before us

rising south and west
to the tor,

weather-messaged, Inca
asymmetrical

where wild ponies shelter
behind out of the wind
and a black foal approaches
close-up
to you, out of focus
in the lens.

To the true west a trail out
into open moor
the further landmass
dropping away, stepped
cliffs falling
to the far off
sea.

On our about-face
trek, the village
not so very far away:
a line of houses
on a climb northwest
the radio tower’s marker disappearing
into mist
and to the east, grey tall-
chimneyed prison buildings
circled with Victorian granite
(not razor wire-topped chain link).

Inmates unseen, unknown
inside that January sadness,

closeby to us on our wonder-eyed
first owning
of this wild expanse.

2. Corsham Hill

The oak
holding up its empty
candelabra
to the winter sky

on the middle wire
strung from the telephone pole
a robbin
chest throbbing-
sings

drops

disappears

under the mist-touched
brow
of the nearest up curve,
Corsham Hill.

Continuous this rise
of the moorland

and soft procession
of wind rain-saturated air,

overlapping

so I cannot make out
is it cloud
trailing down

or some not yet clearly back-lit
outcrop
reaching up?

The kissing touch persists
through late afternoon

through dusk,
and evening dark.

Wry Duty

—somewhat after G. M. Hopkins

Rococo of branches’ scribbled bliss—to
skies of cirrus filtering streaking-linen
grace; to fuzzed nubs of antlers on young bucks
out back; rotunda’d, wind-felled oaks; insects’
notes; hedges shivered and lulled; dawn, water,
and dune; to plants’ husks, tremors, vibrations,
and tongues; stems’ tubes sculpted, impromptu, and
smooth-furred; to whatso is furtive, vital,
and taut-calm; still-strung; benignant-brute—their
lyrics’ candor captures absolution.

D. R. James has taught college writing, literature, and peace-making for 36 years and lives in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. His latest collections are If god were gentle (Dos Madres) and Surreal Expulsion (Poetry Box), and a new chapbook, Flip Requiem, will release in March 2020 (Dos Madres). https://www.amazon.com/author/drjamesauthorpage

Awakening

Lie back on the young spring grass.
Let the wind ruffle its blades
against your skin. Feel their green.
The sun shines softly today.
Let it in.
Close your eyes, but only half-way.
See the blur of the azure sky,
puffed with clouds of white and gray.
The birds wild cry on high
as they float on the waves of air.
Today tastes like warm wine.
Drink in its elixir.
Begin anew.

Cynthia Pitman, a former high school Advanced Placement English teacher from Orlando, Florida, has had poetry published by Amethyst Review, Right Hand Pointing, Three Line Poetry, Third Wednesday (contest finalist), Vita Brevis, Leaves of Ink, Ekphrastic Review, Postcard Poems and Prose, Adelaide, and others. Her book, The White Room, is forthcoming.

The thin silence

is the hush between breaths,
the single atoms’ breadth between us,
which has of late gaped to a void
when darkness slipped into the gap.

Blinker my eyes to see only light,
set my stumbling feet
into a cleft in the rock;
anchor me there as you pass by.

Come to me in quietness,
or let me find you at my elbow
where you have been waiting
for the trembling to stop.

Naomi Marklew lives in Durham in the North of England, where she moved to study poetry in 2007. She writes poems and blogs at poeticpotential.blogspot.com.

Singing Out for Love’s Return

For twelve years, Daisy has been the best dog any person could love. But last week, when she disappeared into the woods? That wasn’t what I was thinking. As I tramped along the wet trail, calling for her, other words came to mind.

We’ve rambled together through these woods for years. Well, I ramble. She bounds. Even now, slowed by arthritis, something out there makes a puppy of her. So, mostly, she remains a black blur through the trees. After a while, I turn back and she meets me at the trailhead. Except last week, when, for the first time, she didn’t. I had to walk back up the trail into the woods, whistling, singing out, “Daisy! Daisy! Here girl!” Like a fool.

Which is how it is sometimes between me and God. Some know God as a thunderstorm: scary, overwhelming. Others, as a porch light: steady, soft, always on. But I like a Celtic image for the Spirit: a wild goose. Untamed, ungoverned by our words, our demands, our categories of mind. A wild goose goes where it will.
For Christians, Lent is a wilderness time. A time when it’s not clear how, or if, Love will win in the end. A time to ponder Love’s elusiveness. Its absence. I’ve known times when I’ve wandered, bereft. Maybe you have, as well. What if Love wasn’t a far porch light, toward which we had to trudge? What if it was a wild goose, a wet dog? Instead of some grim pursuit, in our desire to meet it, we’d be compelled to sing out. To invite, to entice, it.

In the end, Daisy returned, very pleased with herself. But, before? In the woods? When I thought she was gone? All I knew was my part: to sing out her name.

.

Jake Morrill is a minister and therapist in East Tennessee. He holds degrees from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Harvard Divinity School, and is a recipient of the post-graduate Michener-Copernicus Fellowship from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His 2011 novella, Randy Bradley, was published by Solid Objects (New York). He has upcoming publications of narrative nonfiction pieces in River Poets Journal, Braided Way, Round Table Literary Journal, and Adelaide Literary Magazine.

Ode to Elijah’s Laughter

Your laughter sounds
like the forgiveness
I have never been able
to offer myself.

Whole, pure, and healing.
A song of redemption—

Raise my right hand
over your heart and I might
leave it there, so I can feel
where your joy is born

and name that place
what we have no language
to contain.

By day, Julia Bonadies is an 8th-grade English teacher at Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts Middle, and by night she is a professional writing tutor at Manchester Community College. Her work most recent work can be found in The Chronicle, Halfway Down the Stairs, and NEATE’s The Leaflet.

“Death is the mother of Beauty”
Wallace Stevens

To know this truth
is to follow the path
of a gull as he glides
downward in the stillness
of a held breath.

To know this truth
is to linger as a silent
procession of small ripples
of waves makes its way
to the rocks where
it consents to stop
without a stir or sound.

To know this truth
is to watch the late autumn
sun brush the trees’ last leaves
of brown with a copper tint.
They chime in the uplift of the wind.

Janet Krauss, who has two books of poetry published, Borrowed Scenery, Yuganta Press, and Through the Trees of Autumn, Spartina Press, has recently retired from teaching English at Fairfield University. Her mission is to help and guide Bridgeport’s  young children through her teaching creative writing, leading book clubs and reading to and engaging a kindergarten class. As a poet, she co-directs the poetry program of the Black Rock Art Guild.