Adrien Helm, What the Living Do

What the Living Do

Adrien

Pull the weeds,

Clear away the leaves,

Plant the new blooms,

Caress the warm stone.

Sort the photographs,

Reframe the fading prints,

Straighten the rogues’ gallery,

Return yesterday’s gaze.

Revisit the cross word,

Regret the unasked query,

Rue the unextended hand,

Sigh into the present day.

                                    AWH 4/29/2020

Folks at our zoom meeting April 22, 2020

Here we are, left to right: [top] Marc Creaven, Joanne Giannino, Joan and Jed Feffer; 
[bottom] Sylvia Manning, Moira Colleen O'Neill, Adrien Helm.

Two recent poems by Hannah Vogel

 March 2020

There’s something in the breath of snow
That puts the world to sleep. 
Snowflakes murmur unspoken vows 
And fractals secrets keep.

The groundhogs grovel lower now 
Into their shanty dens. 
The sight of nimbostratus clouds 
Unfurls upon the glen.

In the shade of powdered evergreens  
The white-tailed deer step high; 
The fawns born springtime’s brevity 
Shall shiver while they die.

And old bucks come count their blessings, 
And old doe come count their bucks. 
Their judgment day is pressing 
On lungs the frost has struck.

But storms themselves are brevities, 
Like does and bucks and fawns, 
And winter fever’s remedy 
Is berry blooms and awns.

So soon the thickets deepen; 
The game trails wind away;
No groundhogs foresee their reaping 
Among the deer’s decay.

Hannah smiles at her sister Maren.  Collen is their grandmother.

Sometimes the world ...

Sometimes the world comes apart at its seams
Like embroidery on an ill-tailored dress 
Or stitching on a child’s teddy bear,
Loved too hard and abused twice to that crime. 
Then like some post-apocalyptic vale, 
The roads, those skeletons of us, are bare
Save the cracks who lacerate their arching backs;
Whose origins these amble minds perplex.
And in the fields ‘side these nightmarish bones
The stumps of corn stalks cut before the snow
Have reemerged from weeks of that pyrite glow
And rest in rows that reach on for miles
Like headstones, in this graveyard that turns over 
year after year, names erased, henge askew,
half-buried in the years of flower mulch
And climbing moss that holds a dead man’s hue.
And lurching in the soil soft from mild tears
They lean aside as though to say
“Thanatos spares no mother or her brood.” 
In this, in some cold-dired mood, the land
Some bloom has just begun to entertain
Past days rolling over like clouds and rain.
The fields, rolling over, look almost dun
Has Gaea herself turned over her grave
Such that crows congregate but share no feasts?
They toss the bones; they read the leaves;
Those Haruspices divining doom
And know they need not fear their hunger soon. 
The crow flies; birds sing; crows feet keep eyes company. 

Goldfinches, by Jed Feffer

Jed Feffer

Day by day
more of the goldfinches
are sporting
patches of canary yellow
on backs
on throats
on tails
and today
looking up through
branches
I saw the star
shape of flowers
breaking open
on twigs.
There were flocks
of robins
on a farmer's field
ducks erupting
in the sky
and the tweedling
and wheezing of blackbirds
in the trees.
It is spring
It is muddy
It is spring
weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

for Ella, poem by Sylvia Manning

Ella Goodwin stands on porch of Hovey Sanitarium, Glover, 1910

for Ella, para ella

Yesterday with sun and moon
both high to see in bright sky

me wishing my dearest was still around
for me to ask, to tell me why
           it was so

I remembered you
by 1910 a young widow

probably with things to ask or say
to him whom you’d loved
         who’d passed away

too soon, even of this
of the sun and the moon

El sol.  La luna.
Masculino, femenina
El, la, El la, El, la … Ella Ella

but discovered soon, another way,
the two are visible every day

somewhere, anyway,
anywhere, really,

except for the one day
after the night the moon is full.

Then the masculine sun will be alone,
solamente él, el sol, solo, en soledad.

She rose at sunset, then,
to be gone when he’d return.

                                                                     Sylvia Manning, December 2019

by Fran Blake Smith

Apologies to Fran and all from the blog-keeper, who just discovered this poem that had been left as an unpublished draft, for two years!

“The place I live in is called the Northeast Kingdom.”

(author's note, Mark T. Creaven, a life lived backwards)

Well, where’s the king?

And does he reside with royal entourage

On a hardscrabble hill

Almost too rocky to farm?

What has this word “kingdom” to do with wealth?

And why is wealth reckoned in currency, not poetry?

Why indeed when on this Fall mornings

Kings and queens can look out the kitchen door

To see gossamer rising from emerald fields

And spot the early-turning leaves like jewels

Sprinkled by nature’s lavish hand around their property?

Their property.

Something to be said for that.

Our collective property, we Royals all:

Our Northeast Kingdom.

Fran Blake Smith

Wednesday Poets

from Judith Janoo, her poem Snow Travels

Snow Travels  

Judith Janoo, probably taken on a summer day

light and down

in this kingdom

sweeps parallel

as supine you gaze,

question why remain,

and miss the great escape

south or west

still braced against

last week’s freeze

that wheezes, moans

bone scrapes bone

until at once unleashed

into white silence

you travel as wind crystals

over neighbor’s blue van

abandoned, up to its wheels

in white, over roofless shed

left open to soft fragments    

falling over the woodpile

lining the drive

lighting on fir saplings

bowed down and higher,

birches regal parchment

cleaving and even these

peeled, dried,

crowned.