Garden of Verse-Virtual: March Moments

            My favorite online literary journal (a highly prejudiced view), Verse-Virtual, has just published its latest issue, uncoincidentally referred to as the March issue, with another contribution by yours truly. Please take a look if you have a chance. The link is:

http://www.verse-virtual.com/robert-c-knox-2015-march.html

            These poems are very wintry. They're about shadows, snow, memory, and the few wintry creatures that keep us company, if only on the other side of the window glass -- mostly birds. I've written about the hawk ("The Hawk Who Loved Me") before, that was back some time where you could imagine walking in the Quincy marshes without fear of perishing somewhere stuck in the snow with your legs plunged into a hole up to your waist. (Fortunately that only happened so far in my backyard.)

          The poem about the gull and the sun and moon talking may be my favorite. In times like these who wants to stick to writing about "how things really are"? Maybe that natural desire to be somewhere (at least occasionally) explains half or more of the storytelling, fables, folk tales and poems that human beings have come up with over the centuries?

            That poem, "What Gulls Eat in Winter" begins this way:

the gulls eat snow
in the high noon light
the strand exposed at low tide
rocks and the waste of the ocean floor
snow gleamed everywhere,
reflecting the grinning sun
All this have I done, the sun seemed to say,
I have whipped up the currents, roiled the winds
I blew my hot breath upon the ocean,
squirreled up highs and lows, inversions, reversions, wild temptations
loosed my vengeance on the placid sprawling life
that endures, or thinks it does, all winter by the sea
I have sent my blanket of snow to warm my children
and feed the gulls...

http://www.verse-virtual.com/

            Happy March, everyone. At least we get to say goodbye to February.