POEMS BY MEMBERS
HALLO!
Dewell H. Byrd
Hi, Neighbah.
Up here
in the tree house.
Whatcha doin’?
Plantin’ flowahs?
What kind?
They bloom?
What colah?
Snails eat ‘em?
I like flowahs.
Red ones.
Can I come ovah?
Plant one?
I lost a toof.
Wanna see?
Got a dollah fah it.
From the Toof fairy.
I can buy flowahs,
ice cream,
candy
with my dollah.
I’m goin’ to school
nex’ yeah.
Kinneygaren.
Wanta see my dollah?
Wanta see my muskle?
Do flowahs have muskles
like me?
Bye, Neighbah.
RISING TO JOIN THE SWANS IN
FLIGHT
Harding Stedler
The fog is layering
off the water,
making clouds
above the lake.
A brisk fall wind
nudges them into motion,
sending them high
on an easterly course.
They join other tufts of fluff
below where planes fly
in search of ocean.
Migrating swans
blend feathers with clouds
and cushion themselves
in flight.
I long for trumpeter mornings
when I can tell
where feathers end
and clouds begin
on the exit ramps
to flyways.
AUTUMN WIND
Diane Auser Stefan
Wind
blows soft
stirring leaves
of gold and red
then whistles around
houses and dances through
trees tossing off illusions.
Breeze chases leaves down to dry ground,
pins them there to shelter Spring’s promise—
death of tree wings insure green birth next year.
AUTUMN SONG
Pat Laster
God's handiwork is all
around,
magenta, scarlet, yellow leaves;
sun-burnished pasturelands abound,
cut, ripened wheat stands bronzed in sheaves.
Magenta, scarlet, yellow
leaves,
umbrella groves of sassafras,
cut, ripened wheat stands bronzed in sheaves --
a visual banquet unsurpassed.
Umbrella groves of sassafras,
a camouflage for brindle cows,
(a visual banquet unsurpassed)
which nonchalantly chew and drowse.
Like Garland's fresh-shaved
stubble, gold,
sun-burnished pasturelands abound,
and I sing with the oriole,
"God's handiwork is all around."
NOVEMBER, FIRST TUESDAY
Pat Durmon
My, my, my. Politicians lift
voices high
and want to be our one-and-only pumpkin pie.
I see that not one stays in the background—
all insist on the lucky ducky foreground.
All candidates raise hands as
winners,
but I’ve had it with all campaign grinners.
Their installed voices— through my T.V. set—
sound dull, diluted, but spell-binding yet.
Triple-tongued, they lightly
give one-eyed
promises and zippy zingers that prophesy.
Most talk a blue streak under a camera-sun . . .
and voters grow fond of them, one by one.
Can we, as a people, not tell
dark from light?
Poets rock backwards on heels each night
and reduce webs to bones to show the complex:
hard hours for voters, poets and the vexed—
you know, the birds who got
no seed.
INDIAN SUMMER
Gwendolyn Eisenmann
Sun came out from
behind yesterday's dark wind,
cold gone to tomorrow
or wherever November waits.
What a morning! Red maple
trees
highlight sweeps of sunlight
under blue and gold,
and roosters call hens to
hide
from a high hawk circling.
Indian summer, Indians and you gone
from here and now
except that time is timeless
and we are. So is love.
TIM
Steve Penticuff
I choose a blue t-shirt with
orange
letters and a glorious orange bass:
Big Tim's Bait & Tackle, it reads.
I wear it for no particular reason
except it's clean and on top of the pile,
and I suppose I like how it fits.
An hour later I'm at Lowes
wheeling around gravel and top soil,
and I see a big, friendly man grinning
fiendishly, pointing and tapping at
the orange bass on his shirt. His is faded
and extra large; otherwise, same shirt.
Tim asks hopefully,
bashfully,
almost in a whisper, "Your name Tim,
too?" "No, Steve," I say apologetically,
and we bask in the consciousness
of coincidence for a few seconds
before parting awkwardly.
We pass each other again ten
minutes later.
I have light bulbs and a furnace filter now,
which I'm thinking I should have picked up
before the gravel and top soil.
"Take care, Steve," he says. "See you
later, Tim," I say.
If Tim is like half of middle
America,
he's telling his wife the story right now,
and she's telling him something like,
"everything happens for a reason." And
maybe he's still awed by the coincidence
(in spite of my wrong name).
Or maybe big Tim is a
thinker.
Maybe he has a philosophy degree like
mine, and he's analyzing the hell out of this,
wondering whether it wouldn't be stranger
still if two men with the same t-shirt
did not run into each other more often.
My favorite scenario, of
course,
has Tim writing a poem right now:
It's in six-line stanzas and begins,
"I choose a blue t-shirt with orange
letters and a glorious orange bass:
Big Tim's Bait & Tackle, it reads."
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ADAM NAMES THE ANIMALS
Carla Kirchner
"We can name God only by taking creatures as our starting point, and
in accordance with our limited human ways of knowing and
thinking."—Catechism of the Catholic Church
With man’s first heard
breath,
language brought the death
of God.
The sweet taste and deft
bite of words were meant
to prod
truth from air, yet theft
began when sound left
Adam’s lips. Bereft
of sense, language left
a cod
little length or depth
to contain a breadth
of soul, God’s pure heft.
To begin His death,
we gave Truth to breath.
SHE WAS JUST HERE
Tania Gray
The hardware sign said “Miss Mixed Paint,”
so I cast off my self-restraint
indulging curiosity
to see this beauty queen so quaint.
“I like to mix the paint
myself,
perhaps she paints a bit herself
and that is how she won her crown,”
I muttered as I passed each shelf.
But nowhere by the
fireplace logs
was there a girl in rainbow togs
nor was among the ropes and chains
a gorgeous gal, nor with the clogs
and tulip trowels did this
girl hide.
I quite expected to collide
with Meek’s Miss Paint in any aisle,
so I kept looking eagle-eyed.
At last I knew my quest was
spurned,
my hopes were dashed, my plans adjourned
when I saw this hand-lettered sign:
“Miss Mixed Paint can’t be returned.”
WRONG ROAD TAKEN
Faye Adams
Four feet to the sky, he lay
in an attitude of surrender
confessing his sins
of hunger, of greed
of slavery to his quest
for surprise, for enchantment
around the next bend.
The Armadillo found
that life sometimes slings
death and destruction
and the road not taken
would have been the right one
had he known.
BELLE OF AMHERST
Todd Sukany
This morning,
I drank your lemon hair
down to your blossom.
I took my fill of life.
Your love bolts me
and I am captive.
Uncovered,
your love-cries
sit published.
Many snicker
that death has stopped for you.
They misunderstand.
They misrepresent.
For me,
our heaviest gasp
precedes release.
POETIC INSPIRATION
Heather Lewis
My imagination is as
productive as a cheap lint roller,
feebly trying to pick up some discarded scraps.
Making an effort to sweep up
some of the lint and have a clean start.
But nothing happens;
there is no spark of creativity left.
I’ve got song lyrics, fragments of poems read in classes,
funny things my friends have said, random lines
from movies, pictures of places I’ve been
and want to go, memories.
I see potential in all these things, but trying
to write a poem from them is like hopelessly
persuading a child to eat lima beans.
ELATED
Jean Even
Come, O my soul, and
celebrate in the beauty of the Lord.
The heavens are rejoicing and the earth is full of gladness,
The seas are roaring in laughter and the fields are delighted.
The isles are elated while the stars twinkle cheerfully, and
The trees sway in jubilation rustling their leaves with mirth.
The Lord reigns forever in Zion, His bride waits while,
The daughters of Judah are rejoicing in our God's judgments.
Soon we'll all exult Him when He calls us home in one accord.
MYSTERIOUS STRANGER
Laurence W. Thomas
In a trunk in the attic I
find a packet of letters
tied in a ribbon. Half a dozen, neatly typed
and dated from the turn of the century.
Signed by a man whose name I don’t know,
they recount meetings, are filled with endearments,
and something about the beauty of holiness.
I think about letters in some stranger’s attic
bewildering his offspring, as I burn his letters.
Mother, a widow of some fifteen years, died
quietly in her sleep leaving four grown children
and a trunk with love letters stashed in the attic.
NIGHT GUEST
Henrietta Romman
At 3 am that knock…tic-tac-toc
came,
I rose. Startled, shaken and awaken-
wondering “would that mean a guest?”
Bemused I stood with light in hand,
at the command of alarmed senses,
speeding in the night headed toward
the sound. I frowned. Nothing save
same repeated knocks of equal beat
with my own heart! I stopped startled
glared then smiled—yet in the dark
my mind had peace at what I saw.
Valiant in that greatly
festive zone,
while silence was lit by that full moon,
peacefully paused my visitant. Bushy tailed,
unafraid, majestic as a king just crowned,
wee head, bold amid the dozen broken acorns,
plus some shells, victims of those steady
tic-tac-tocs, it stood. With amazed looks of pride,
turning piercing eyes upon me—just as though
to know, the reason for my incorrect invasion--
I had none. I spun
around…retrieved my steps
and joyfully fled back to the quiet land of sleep
and my exotic dreams. For then I did reflect,
“Am I an equal to the night-life of my hopeful
hungry company, camping upon my property?”
Sure enough, looking so frail with that thick tail
he knew that all that on which he dined and wined
in life, plus all the land around…just belong to our God….
And our God alone…
SCANDINAVIAN LULLABY
Tom Padgett
“Before going to
sleep he read two pages of a book
by Stein Riverton” in Murder at the Savoy
by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo
Two mystery writers,
man and wife--
Swedish authors of wide acclaim—
in one of ten novels they wrote together,
put their weary detective to sleep
after two pages of bedtime reading.
Furthermore, they tell us who
wrote the book the detective read--
a mystery writer (without a wife)—
Norwegian author of wide acclaim--
in one of ninety-eight novels he wrote
failed to keep the detective awake
after two pages of bedtime reading.
VISIT WORKSHOP FOR
AN ASSIGNMENT.
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