The Garden of Verse: A World of Gratitude in a Harvest of New Poems -- October's Verse-Virtual

  

         It's harvest season. Here's a harvest of offerings from the October 2017 edition of Verse-Virtual.com.

As Joan Mazza's poem "Before the first bite" reminds us, when the harvest brings us to table,

Pause to see the colors
in front of you. Reflect
on those who grew
this wheat and ground
its heart, turned semolina
into pasta. Who tends
olive groves, presses
the fruit into oil, bottles it.
Grazie."
 

The poem's fine dining vocabulary, its active verbs (tends, presses, bottles) and compressed lines work together to focus our attention on the ides of gratitude. It's a good season for it.

            On a similar theme, gratitude to the "ordinary saints" who serve us, both mind and body, is always in season. Joan Colby's fresh supply of praise poems for oft-overlooked occupations introduces us to facts about these jobs and those who do them are either ignored (meaning I ignore them) or simply unknown (a similar declaration of ignorance here). Such as the farm worker: 

"attaching the vacuum tubes
To the teats so the milk will flow"

A second poem reminds me, painfully, how we call on the "Saint Geek" to address "the blue screen of perdition" -- god, naming the devil! I have to cross myself after naming that one.

As for the manicurist, see these brilliantly apt lines:

 "How you nail us
With a styled creation
To indemnify against an
Onus of manual labor." ​
            The onus is on us.

           

            The cleverness of "You, Singular" by Edward Conti relies on its brief declaratives and witty rhymes. Its lyrics evoke not only singularity, but childhood, as in the unexpected final line of this stanza:

"You can make fun of me
I hope you do.
There’s only one of me.
How many are you?"

Only one, perhaps, but one can be more than enough. I also enjoyed the poem's reach into the "Thin Man" comedies to find an unexpected canine rhyme for "master." That line "I’ll be your Asta" may dog me for some time to come. And I'm grateful for it.

            We're likely to find more than a measure of gratitude in Joe Cottonwood's "Autopsy of a Douglas Fir" as well. In the beautifully composed first stanza alone, the poem evokes not only the act of harvesting a tree, but the land, ecology and peoples of "three centuries of wooden wisdom."

"In your bleeding cross-section I count
three centuries of wooden wisdom
since that mother cone dropped
on soil no one owned.
Black bears scratched backs
against your young bark. Ohlone
passed peacefully on their path
to the waters of La Honda Creek."

            I'm thankful also for the poem's introduction to me of the name "Ohlone," used for the surviving lineages of the indigenous peoples of the San Francisco Bay.

            Gratitude for a certain kind of immortality is the theme of Marilyn Taylor's "The Day After I Die," expressed with a fine satirical eye.

"they will find the cure
for whatever got me,
and a unified theory
of physics will be announced
by a consortium
from M.I.T."

            Those aren't the only wonders that will follow the demise of the speaker of this poem. Also predicted are answers to the age-old questions. Are we alone in the universe? What address do I plug into the GPS for the fountain of youth? The energy crisis? -- all resolved. Check out the final stanza for the greatest discovery of them all.

            Alan Walowitz's moving poem "Anthony Peter Tumbarello" may remind us to be grateful for those who cross our paths in life, and keep re-crossing them. The poem tells the story of the poet's relationship with his childhood friend, and the cross "Tony" bore all his life, in a few perfectly chosen lines that pack a whole story into a sentence.  

"When we walked
other kids would stare
and sometimes strangers’d
cross the street to inquire, Son, what’s wrong with your friend?
as if Tony couldn’t hear
for being so bent.

            There's a world of tragedy in the stranger's thoughtlessly expressed inquiry, even if it was not ill-intended, and even if it was actually well meant. And a world of stubborn courage in Tony's response, delivered smartly at the end of this poem.

            The title of Robert Wexelblatt's poem "Going to Bed with Jane Austen" has a ring of inevitability. We all go to bed from time to time with a favorite author. Where the poet takes this notion however is wholly original, satirical, revealing, and wise. A sort of compact novel in a concise lyric.

            Something else that bedtime is good for, storytelling and its many uses, also comes in for an apposite nod (and wink?)  -- "like that famous sultan, I finally fall asleep." A beautifully crafted poem.
            My thanks, since we're handing out gratitude, also go Verse-Virtual's indefatigable editor Firestone Feinberg, who continues to put together such finely seasoned bounties of verse every month. 
            Find all these poems and others at http://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html