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Apologies to Fran and all from the blog-keeper, who just discovered this poem that had been left as an unpublished draft, for two years!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

Wednesday Winter Poets Meeting Again

Here they were last February.  Isn't it worth a thousand words?  2:30 p.m., Barton Public Library, Wednesdays

Dolores Chamberlain's poem, My Maple Tree

Dolores at a poetry reading by Charles Simic,
summer of 2018, the Old Stone House in
Brownington, Vermont.  [photo credit, Sylvia Manning]

MY MAPLE TREE

Your branches all around,

Green leaves clinging, still abound.

I left that morning -- you were there.

Your lofty branches filled the air.

When I returned, all I could see

Were piles of what you used to be.

I was saddened to the core;

My maple tree lived there no more.

A trunk, dismembered, stood in place

Where once you were, now empty space.

Six decades you grew and proudly stood.

Gone is your shade, and it was good.

The squirrels around your trunk gave chase.

How fast they moved!  Was it a race?

Birds sang softly high above:

The goldfinch, robins, mourning dove.

How I will miss you, lovely tree.

You really meant so much to me.

I won't forget you, maple tree,

For you live on in memory.

Maple tree across the street from our Barton Public Library where Wednesday Poets meet
at 2:30 p.m., Wednesday, for the second year of winter meetings.

Dolores' poem was published in the Orleans County Chronicle
and the Green Mountain Trading Post

For Friend Stephen, Bibliophile

Below is Sylvia Manning's prose poem for Stephen Hickey as published in the October, 2019 issue of Waterways:  Poetry in the Mainstream (NYC, Ten Penny Press)

For Friend Stephen, Bibliophile                                     

Stephen Hickey, a Wednesday Poet
and all-time, any-time bibliophile

Years ago when asked if he had a plan for what might happen to his collection, thousands of books, 65 years of his collecting them, some printed before wood pulp, books worthy of opening but handsome inside and out, he said it was his worst nightmare, not knowing.

His house has two stories, two apartments, both used mostly by these nonpaying guests – bound to his largesse for their continued existence.  Many were bought for pennies at village church rummage sales or library weed lots -- to make shelf space for mass market shiny covers -- however costly they once had been.

Someone tells him there’s a city that brags of its new library that hasn’t a single book.  He’s not surprised.  He himself has discovered online books even he doesn’t have; he reads from paper less. But if someone mentions a title he thinks they’d like to read (or even just hold), he goes right to it.

They’ve been his family and friends almost all his life, and he accepts now that they may not survive him.  They’ll hopefully become soil after they’re thrown to darkness too deep for any reader, wood pulp and pure rag, paperback and cloth. 

Recently he said he doesn’t have many nightmares anymore.

from Sylvia Manning, Couplets for 2 black men killed by police ....

Sylvia Manning on left with Creekside Poets in Seguin, Texas,
a town between Austin and San Antonio, where she winters.

Sylvia says that this poem came back rejected.  One or two in the group told her to put it on this blog, even though it's not brand new.   In her mind it met the sense of a poem we'd been given as prompt.

Couplets for 2 black men killed
by police in Texas, February, 2016:
Antronie Scott and David Joseph

For these two killed last week

in nearby cities, do we seek

justice?

But how is that done

when each of us has one

life

and only one? How then

does any justice serve? And when

will those who should be here

to save such lives be given clear

demand to stop the killing

of young black men, spilling

especially

their blood and lives needlessly

onto our city streets, heedlessly?

(Forgive these weak and rhyming lines,

but how indeed the sacrifice of lives

dear to us?)

                                                                         Sylvia Manning

                                                                         Seguin TX, 2016

Jean Morris shares her poem, A true.

Jeany read her poem at St. Johnsbury Athenaeum

A true

A true test of a stone, then, is if it feels good

            in both hands; twice enclosed.

            This and no other.

A true test of a beach, then, is what toys it shows you.

            Golden red plastic holds you, on both wrists.

            This color and no other.

A true test of a sea, then, is the song you hear.

            A wind of golden red stone;

            white wrists; enclosed hands.

A test to be true is here.

                                         

     

NEW PICTURE FOR OUR PROFILE

Barton Public Library table by the window, July 2019

by Judith Janoo

Edge of the Gorge        
           Man is by nature a political animal —Aristotle

Judith at Barton Public Library, 2018

Canyons between us we can’t understand.                                         

Tell me stranger at this political divide,

what thresholds you failed to cross,

what you lost, that there’s more

than nothing between us.

Freedom of thought, soft as Lambs-ear,

cashmere, fragrant as thyme-walked

ground. Somewhere between love & hate,

atheist & saint. Even Tolstoy wrote first of war.

Peace falls like spring rain, an eagle feather.

Tell me neighbor of thresholds you failed

to cross, what you lost, that there’s more

than nothing between us.

“Can you divide this apple into three halves?”

your daughter asked, feeding other hungry mouths

as she opened hers. Division as portioning.

Peace drops like a whisper between prairie warbler

and lark bunting, one feeder, tern and gull, one shore,

low tide and high. Over mountains, plains, drop

all your thoughts, friend, until edges give way, tell me

of thresholds you failed to cross, what you lost,

that there’s more than nothing between us. I’m wary

watching the broad-winged hawk circle, dive & rise.

Let stones shake from the ground up.

I want to feel the lift of your breath

on my cheek as you speak.

                                  ~  Judith Janoo

Mark Creaven's poem written in meeting, June 5, Word Slinging....

Mark Creaven, June 5, 2019

WORD SLINGING

Only the way the corners of my mouth                              

Break their silence and curve

Ever so gently

Do I show how pleased I am

To see one line fall upon the page

Followed by its sister

Waiting for a while

Another line burps upon the page.

The air seems to move

To blow the words one atop

The other.

Now the thread that was

An idea breaks and I am

Left gasping, trying

To tie it all up

In a bright and shiny bow.

                                                                  

Sylvia Manning finds a poem she wrote in Barton in 1973, to Albert Huffstickler.

To see a (not very good) picture of Albert Huffstickler (Huff), you can go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Huffstickler. 

There are several websites where you can read his poems.  Here's the poem Sylvia Manning found today in old papers, one she wrote in Barton in 1973:


to Huff

I say I cannot write
but to you of course it's true
that there is blue flame
beneath an orange coffee pot
and to you it will continue
to be important that sometimes
in the long October morning
a cow brays
outside a city dwelling
as though to say

                       'since I'm here, and you,
                       another, you will know me.
                       I don't care how long it takes.
                       Your morning will always
                       have blue flames and
                       warmth in small cities.

                       (Friends taught.)

                       My mama taught me to make noise.
                       I'm like you.'

and to this day you are
my coffee memory.

                                                                   Barton, Vermont
                                                                                                                            October 24, 1973



(Now Sylvia is amused that she thought of Barton as a small city; and now Albert Huffstickler has been dead more than 17 years.)