Writing Poetry Again: A Garden of Verses

            I'm writing poetry again.

            Three of my poems from a group written in the last couple of years are being published in this month's issue of an online poetry journal called "Verse-virtual." 

            Poems, or ideas for poems, began visiting me a few years ago, a return I associated with both the progression of life towards its later stages and the amount of time I began spending outdoors close to the ground, often on it, getting to know the lives of plants.

            At least the plants, and the activity of trying to grow them, provided the material to write about, draw from, or allude to. And the act of gardening, and the garden itself, provided a small army of metaphors.

            Here's the link for the published poems:

            http://www.verse-virtual.com/current-poetry.html

            The first poem, "The Tiny Beak the Flower Bends," comes from an encounter with a hummingbird that for some reason did not notice me standing on the patio bricks and so hovered very close by. I must have been standing still for some considerable time, the reason for which I cannot recall. How else to explain why I looked to the tiny, active, and generally highly suspicious bird like a stunted tree? In any event it felt perfectly secure in examining the nearby flora at its own pace. I have a feeling that the penny dropped at some bird's-eye instant, and then my my rendezvous with the winged creature the size of an overfed wasp bearing a characteristically aggrieved expression in its avian eye was abruptly terminated.

            However, the close encounter left its impression.

            The poem "At Wollaston Beach" attempts to sum up an hour when it seemed almost the whole span of Greater Boston urban life was present on a July evening on the strip of sidewalk that abuts Shoreline Drive on one side and the state's sandy beachfront on the other. For a complex of reasons people spend more time walking, biking, hanging out, staring at their phones and people-watching on the walkway at this 'beach' than they do on the sand. The seawall invites sitting. The clam houses across the roadway provide a good shoreline ambiance, particularly fried seafood smell, and a diversity of ages and stages of life are generally represented.

            Verse-Virtual's journal's editor, Firestone Feinberg, was very kind in preserving some odd punctuation I whipped up to slow the pace of the poem's concluding lines. 

             The third poem, "'My Little Girl' Dreams," does follow from a series of dreams that, to the best of my conscious recollection, featured the image of a little girl. Some of the imagery of the poem, however, comes from my highly grown-up daughter Sonya's account of a birthday party thrown for her, mixed up -- in an airy milestone anniversary confection -- with memories of things we did together in her childhood.

            Many other poets have work appearing in this issue of Verse-Virtual. If you have the time and the inclination, this online journal rewards attention.