The Garden of Verse: Ancient China, Faraway Places, Skinned Knees and Personal Bests in April's Verse-Virtual

            So many excellent poems in the April issue of Verse-Virtual. April may be National Poetry Month, but each page of the calendar makes for a very good month of poetry for Verse-Virtual. The optional theme for poets in April was, again, 'your best poem,' a choice that enabled poets to share some of their old favorites with readers.  

           (Find them all at https://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html   )

            Robert Wexelblatt's "The Last Poem of Chen Hsi-wei" completes a series of stories, with embedded poems, featuring the adventures of the fictional peasant-poet Chen Hsi-wei. The parable-like tale tells of a visit to an aging poet by a youthful aspirant who recites to him verses that the aging bard does not recognize as his own -- leading to a reflection that is no less affecting for being inevitable:

"Strange too to think of the poems I wrote long ago
and can no longer remember.  They too will become so
much wind-borne chaff, having also served their uses."

             I found these lines intensely moving -- mentally jumping into stacks of that 'wind-borne chaff' and over-identifying the way good poems make us do.

            Poet Robin Helweg-Larsen responded with three nominations for her best poem, including "This Ape I Am" -- a poem with a brilliant premise worked out with inventive rhyme and formal patterning.

            An example of the poem's playful verse:

"Under our armored mirrors of the mind
Where eyes watch eyes, trying to pierce disguise,
An ape, incapable of doubt, looks out,
Insists this world he sees is trees, and tries
To find the scenes his genes have predefined."

            I love the internal rhyme and sibilance of "Insists this world he sees is trees, and tries..." The line might also serve as a good one-sentence definition of apishness. The whole poem is as fine as it is fun.

            Another putative best, Judy Kronenfeld's "Time Zones" links images from different cities at a single moment in time on an ordinary Old World evening: "rooftop squatters" in Cairo; a robed figure "scuttles from cenotaph to cenotaph" in Egypt's "Cities of the Dead"; a queue forming for bread in Bucharest; "someone weeps" in "rain-smudged" Istanbul; and in the market place of Classical Athens "a gypsy child/ hangs on a tourist’s hand."

            Oh, the humanity, I think, but the poem is braver, allowing the ghosts of all our evenings to gather "in my own room, some press/ against my shoulder," retaining (like Homer's 'shades') their interest in life. This is a poem with a wide and moving vision.

            Another reflective offering, Mary Makofske's "Milk Teeth" is an effort, the poet states, "to capture the complexity and ambivalence of motherhood." Too much time has passed for the speaker to distinguish whose milk teeth are whose, but the effort produces this lovely and fitting image of 'those years' --

"when time slowed to a leaf
seen on our walks, unfolding day by day,
or repeated itself like sandbox castles."

            I haven't thought of sandbox castles in a long time. This poem restores the memory of parenting days.

            Another possible personal best is Penelope Moffett's "Leavening." Something life sustaining rises up in this poem's images of what I take to be the memories of a crucial day:

            "Five hummingbirds hover in fountain spray.
Green and purple, with lacy wingtips,
coming in for midair gulps.
They chase each other off and circle back.

Noon. A dust-colored moth quivers up a screen
above the table, confused by some imagined glow
where all heat, all light swirl in."

            The vivid images of the existence we share with other living things introduces the poem's conclusion, which I will not spoil by citing here.

          Not all of April's poems are offered as personal bests, but so many are plenty good. I love the vitality of the imagery and diction in Steve Klepetar's "Old Neighborhood." I read it with a kind of anxious pleasure in the poem's evocation of a kids' wilderness neighborhood with trees you could climb, sighing with relief at the absence of visitations by EMTs or the cops.  

"We knew every shortcut
through the trees, leapt over roofs
without once breaking our legs
on the long way down." 

            Today people call this behavior 'limits testing,' if they let their kids outdoors at all. But the poem doesn't moralize. It's simply full of action verbs and vivid kid stuff:

"We blew smoke rings at the moon.
Girls giggled as wind tangled their hair.
Our skinned knees throbbed and bled. "

          If you haven't had a chance to read this or the poet's two other fine April offerings, treat yourself.

            Donna Hilbert's beautiful sonnet "Dark Spring" wonderfully captures the contradictions in its title in a rich, densely written appropriation of a classical form, as in these sonorous and happy-sad lines:

"Some happiness mistakes a cry for song.
So too, some misery’s notes are crossed
with joy, and life and death belong
to the same mad throng. ..."

            A marvelously executed poem.

            Among the rich pleasures of its form, Marilyn Taylor's "First Day in London" works in a super helping of Brit-speak. For example, this quatrain of ear-openers:

"I’ll chat you up, I’ll mind the gap,
I’ll not forget my bumbershoot;
I’d love to stay till Boxing Day—
My haversack is in the boot!"

            I could probably find the haversack in the boot, but I have forgotten my bumbershoot too often to pass for a proper Anglophile -- just a Yank after all. Gee whiz!

                Many more fine poems to reward our attention in this issue of Verse-Virtual. And when April's "perhaps hand" wipes away the month's final days, they will still repay a reading. 
                 Find all the poems and articles here: 
https://www.verse-virtual.com/poems-and-articles.html