Kathryn Kyker's poem, Lupa

 

Lupa

“…So mastered by the brute blood of the air…”                                                          from Leda and the Swan, Yeats

 

photo by Kathern Kyker taken while in Italy

                                         

They sell them as fertility charms

bright red, flame-shaped objects

like peppers, the hot kind

 

Phalluses freed from ancient Pompeii

just in case you forgot

this is a man’s world

erect, rigid, piercing

 

Innocents fed to lions

nails through whomever for whatever

by the same men who burned women

for being immoral

 

The goddess they admire turned

a victim of rape into a monster

emulating the masculine

she never emasculates

 

See how ugly a woman becomes

when she won’t hide a man’s crime

against her

 

Starved of circles, spirals, wombs

their mother made a nameless wolf

suckling the young boys who

spilt blood across the world

until finally we hear her growl--

 

Now that’s enough.

                                                kk 3/25

				kathryn kyker

Blogger's Note:  Kathryn Kyker lives in Athens, Georgia, but enjoys frequent travel.  She has visited Barton as guest of Adrien Helm and the Wednesday Poets.  We know her also because some of us attend by internet a poetry group in Athens held luckily on the Wednesday we don't meet in Barton.  Her memoir is soon to be published with accounts from her career as a Social Worker.  The title is Surprised by Nothing: Surviving the ER World of Worst-Case Scenarios, published by Girl Friday Productions.

Sharon Darrow's poem read December 4th, 2024

 

The Walls of This Room Are Glass

                        ("Be more sacred than scared.”—cin salach)

 

Light streams in, golden by day, cool blue moonlight at night.

The Lodger sees what has come before, searches for what is to come.

 

Like a mind, the room observes, grieves, rejoices, converses with itself,

dissecting its past, trembling in future-fear. The Lodger opens a lidded basket.

 

Ethiopia’s blossom-scented night flows around her, takes her

back to the Lucy girl, apelike in age-old beauty. Stillness at the center,

 

chaos swirls around the walls, her mind, her room a sanctuary

from the world’s madness. After the storm, scudding white clouds,

 

short-cropped green grass, a single ink-black raven feather upright,

still wind-buffeted, signals from the middle of a field. A sign of something.

 

The mind wonders what it can mean, so stalwart, so definite, its outline

black against green, wind against glass, sun’s bright glare across the mind.

 

The Lodger sees ancient fingers’ subtle wielding of the stylus,

press into soft clay, words so secret the stone tablet will not yield

 

its cuneiform mysteries to another mind for centuries. Yes, she sees

this as if she holds it in her own hand, as if she lived then, and now,

 

again in the future glass. The Lodger has a typewriter on which

she writes her desperate verse, confesses her fears, but a typo

 

changes a word, changes her world to “I am so sacred.”

No longer afraid, she takes a bouquet of red rose hope

 

to her father on his cancer bed in a small bronze cowboy-boot

vase now empty on the glass shelf near her glass desk,

 

her glass typewriter, her glass mind, golden in the light.

Sharon Darrow

new poem with old things by Joanne Giannino

 

in the antique shop

there are the usual items

 

a child’s wooden desk                                                

Joanne after poetry session
 on October 9, 2024,
Barton VT Public Library

with a bench seat

attached to the front

from a one room school house

part of a set, a row

no longer needed

broken up after the town

built a brick graded school

with metal chairs

still in use

 

and over here a set of

1960’s dishware: cups, saucers

cake and dinner plates

Joanne outside another shop,
Victoria, Prince Edward Island, 2022

salad and soup bowls, maybe

that unmistakable white interior

and exterior unforgettable colors

the names of no one knows

but you know them when you see them.

 

but here on this shelf

a postcard – from somewhere

in New York, a scene, wooded

lake, a winding road

& on the other side a note:

to my dear Franny, we had

such a good time in the country

looking forward to seeing you soon

come for tea! much love,

with a faded signature

the date: 8 April 1921

 

who were they

and how did the card

come to be here

in a box from an estate sale?

the buyer took the whole lot

maybe she found the card

inside a book – meant to

mark a page

a memory to keep

to look at while the reader

read on...

 

what meaning might it have

for someone here

this lazy sunny Saturday

in Brandon Vermont –

who might buy it now –

and what to do with it –

a frame for the image –

or the note –

a bit of nostalgia – a glimpse

at the past of someone

who lived, loved, and is

now gone –

 

they say

we live on

in the memories

of those whose lives

we touch

maybe also in those

who never knew us personally

but only through a card

they now hold

in their hand.

 

– JMG, 9 ottobre 2024

Sugar Kelp, by Judith Janoo

 

Sugar Kelp

       Do not go gentle into that good night—Dylan Thomas

 

Sea garden of green lettuces, red mosses,                         

brown ribbons of sugar kelp caterpillared

just below the surface, spooling spores

 

around rope, above tiers of mussels, oysters—

the new farm, where hunger wraps as it grows,

eats poisons of land and air, while an old man’s

 

bent head gives years to a bed, his hopes

to the cove, the return of the herring

folding into flakes of skin, white powder

 

of Gold Bond a daughter applies for him,

keeping him at home, and the caregivers with

bird names, Phoebe and Robyn, who come

 

mornings to wash him as sugar kelp is washed

by the waves, as it washes what the sea has taken

into itself. All Rise, say those who escaped

 

the firing on the beaches of his war laid down

inside him, near-cleansed, near-resigned as new

fishing ground, where no hook, no catch,

 

only soothing of a daughter’s hands, until

she moves his lighter away from the oxygen tank,

and his pipe, his habit of reaching to ignite it.

 

He’s slid down to the foot of the bed, one leg dangling

the rail, blankets bunched beneath him.

“Can you push a little with your feet?” his daughter says.

 

“They don’t work anymore.”

She reminds him fishermen now farm the waters

he’s spent a lifetime minding. “Growing sugar kelp.”

 

“Seaweed,” he says. “Algae. That stuff?”

Letting go of the buoys, his dories, the ocean and its scales.

                                                                    Judith Janoo

I Met with Mars and Athena, a poem by Eve Fisher

 

Eve Fisher

I met with Mars and Athena
Just the other day
Just because the desire for justice
Leaves us bare
In a cold barren field
As if, really, as if
God has memory
To tally a score
I told them to go home
And change their names
It's late but not too late
There are those who are yearning
With visions of new growth
In a hot wasteland burning
God three folds the envelope of war
Athena stared me in my eyes
Mars looked away
But he held out his hand to me
I took it
And he pressed mine to his forehead
I felt his fever grow cold in three breaths
Athena never broke her gaze
This is how it started
She wanted me to be the first to look away
But I won't this time
And I wouldn't then
I'll go back to the beginning
Here I am
To have a story
She must have memory
And if she does
She's not a God
In the silence is something
Like a new day

Marche into March with Spring in Your Step, poem by Helette Gagnon

 

Helette Gagnon, Montreal

March, fighting back winter, litters and swamps
the terrain—“rain washes away promises.”

It helps to see green not the cold pink aura of Mars.
Large spruces sing again—birds as always hidden.

Dead of winter seems as far away as Mars. White
disappears replaced by grey-brown mud and puddles.

It came early unsure of itself bearing a sullen sun—
enough for a god to brandish his spear and condemn 

Global warming every Tuesday ‘till doomsday. Can’t
let the precious crops fail with testy weather.

This morning snow is back with a vengeance—
inch by inch suffocating the tired sprouts.

Dormant Royals won’t help us nor will dead planets
alone, having caused the eminent demise of another. 

I hear his statues hurling insults in the polluted
atmosphere—scrolls of painful mischief and bewares.

Humans blare with the flare of gods & goddesses—
torrents of guff and belligerent tantrums.

We made the list of extinct species several befores.
Darkness is coming with a fine wind of dust.

Consequence? We aspire for a spring transformed
into old springs—less flooding, while the mountains

Disgorge, the rivers surge.  In mighty skies, as in
desperation, downpours participate.

We are not going back. Futurists see red hazes over
cities—when bleakness overwhelms the earth

War is not far behind.

Steve Cahill's No Disclaimer

Steve Cahill at Whirligig in St. Johnsbury, autumn 2023
 [photo by Scott Norman Rosenthal]


NO DISCLAIMERS

One of the rules of the Barton poets is to make no disclaimers no tedious explanations, no long-winded stories of the origins of the poem, its provenance and lineage, its conception and conceits, because all of that prefacing chatter is a thinly disguised defense. Make no self deprecating little asides about form being clever Or about managing to sneak in a line that ended with forever No, let’s have none of that. Let’s just stand up and shut up and read the poem aloud. Let it stand on its own merits—use words with weight and gravitas, heavy words like Eternity and Infinity plugged in along the way so they will add substance to the poem. As for writing to a prompt—yes, yes, we have them—the one for today is ‘Eternity’ but we are not required to write about them so can go down any rabbit hole we like which makes a loosey-goosey escape clause out of the poetry business and we can write about anything we want. Or nothing. Which turns out to be the case here. You will remember that I made no disclaimers and embedded the prompt, Eternity, carefully in line three of verse three and so have more than fulfilled any obligations to the poetry group and their rules making me free to go off and write whatever the hell I please: so here’s a haiku all about eternity which lasts forever Which, if true, means that something exists that has no beginning and, for that matter, has nothing at the other end either so where did it come from? Like who made it? And why? Who holds the patent? And is there any possible way to prove that something can be endless? I thought not. So now I’m left with the task of nailing down a poem that began with no disclaimers or defense and I plan to leave it the same way because it’s a poem about finding a destination that does not exist and everything I nail down comes loose at the other end but there isn’t one.