The Garden of Verse: The Poems of Our Season -- Verse-Virtual Poets See the Way Things Are in Fresh Ways

            It's summer, season of memories, deep emotion, and stirring metaphors of growth and decay. In the June issue of Verse-Virtual Poets offer fresh views of the way things are and on the realization that they're not necessarily the way we wish them to be.

            In Neil Creighton's "Morteza's Choice," the narrator, a refugee in what strikes me as a nightmare landscape of a crumbling (or already crumbled) societal disruption, tells us what he sees and feels, including this strongly expressed vision:

"He saw again his professor marched 

from the hospital and summarily executed 

for refusing to cut off the ears of prisoners. 

He sees again the long lines of amputees, 

a tidal flow of faces filled with desolation and hope. 

They have come to him as their miracle worker. 

He has a vision of the marketplace,   

the smoke, stench, blood, litter, 

groans, screaming and death."

               To quote another apocalyptic voice: "Everybody's  

having them dreams."   

            In Joan Mazza's two beautifully moving poems I sensed something of the response of many of us to the challenges of Covid Time. Her "Telephone to Another World" gives one of those sublime metaphors for our need to the talk people we no longer can, but find ourselves, sometimes, talking to them in our minds. Here's the poem's account of a "Wind Telephone":

"...where the veil between worlds is thin, the dead

can hear your news of graduations, your purchase

of a home surrounded by oak trees, daffodils, iris,

perfect haven for a pandemic quarantine.

I used to call my mother in New York and then

tune her out, let her criticism roll over me without

comment, allowed her voice to soothe. Today she’d

say, Are you eating well? You need a haircut."

               Yes, I need one of those phones. There always seems to be a lot left unsaid.

            Sylvia Cavanaugh's "Servant Leader" offer us another image rich in its imaginative applications, in her account of flocks of blackbirds who "circle as of one mind." The flock becomes a heuristic for the understanding of time:

"Youngsters are born into this timeless flock

and others die

yet still the dance goes on.

A century ago the murmuration circled

over women hanging out laundry

and children playing games at backyard birthday parties.

A millennia ago it glimpsed the earlier people

treading woodland trails

and building burial mounds

shaped like birds."

            And then it also becomes a metaphor for human 'flocks.' A strong and vivid poem.

            Donna Hilbert's "Days Waiting" is another poem that reveals itself as a response to the sometimes ill-fitting cloak Covid Time has dressed us all in. In an enumeration of life's inevitable waiting periods, that I hear as a chant, the poem tallies:

"days waiting for summer to start

days waiting for summer to end

days of migraine, nights of malaise

days of tedium, nights of dread:

I want them back

not for exchange, but to exclaim

this, too, my human life!"

            Everything matters, the poem tells us. Is this what we're learning?  

            At least, Michael Gessner's insightful poem "Morning Words" tells us, we still have mornings. His poem expands our way of looking at this daily phenomenon:

"In poems, morning words

sound roundly odd, assume selves

born in sunrise, newly woken

to the world, a golden zone."

            This is a poem that scratches the surface of one of our most common everyday experiences, blows away the dust, and polishes the real thing. It also gives me another reason to get out of bed.

            Barbara Crooker's "Still Life With Aubergines, 1911," a graceful conversational poem about Matisse's dynamic still-life, ends with some sound advice about the physical as well as the painter's artistically depicted eggplants. These words not only apply to the kitchen, but turn this fruit of a long, warm growing season into a metaphor for our real summer:

"It could be bitter if not cooked properly.

But salt it first, then simmer on low

all afternoon, releasing its sweetness,

reminding us how summer is fleeting;

reminding us our days in the sun are brief."

            Judy Kronenfeld's three lovely poems are all about the language. We're seeing common experiences anew in these poems as well. In "Window Blinds Leaking Light" it's a child being put down for an afternoon nap, a mother opening and closing the blinds:

"She clicked them up

in gentled flamenco,

when I drowsed full

of dappled sleep, rippled

them down when rose light faded

to the color of their faded ribbons."

            As if this isn't gorgeous enough, we learn of an early morning waking:

2 A.M. — moonmelt pawprints

here and there on the black blanket

            Jeweled words. 

            Tamar Madison's three poems give us metaphors for thinking about experiences many of us have probably known and possibly wish we haven't. The title of "When the Mind Unwinds" offers us the image of a damaged film strip to stand for memory impairment.

And then immediately gives us a second one:

"The bridges that once

linked thoughts collapse

into a jumble of rotting planks

and broken pilings."

            Chances are we have to pick our away through this construction debris to attempt contact with an aging loved one.

            I was even more startled by her poem "The Guys Who Work Inside My Head," who, as the poem explains, when memory drops a stitch come to the rescue:

"I only have to wonder aloud and move on

to another thought when I feel a little tap

on my shoulder or sense the presence

of a calm being behind me and there he is,

or she, or it, handing me a folder

wrapped in a metaphor containing

the datum I couldn’t bring to mind

that short time ago."

            Beautifully inventive writing. Now, I tell myself, I have a happy way to think about what's going on when the word or name I've lost Monday wanders back, unsolicited, on Tuesday afternoon... I must say however that there are times, and days, when I fear the "guys" have lost my address.

            These are also the poems of our times. Some of us working, possibly harder than ever; many of us taking our temperature, possibly a bit too often.

            These poems and many other memorable lyrics are available at http://www.verse-virtual.org/poems-and-articles.html

 June2020 Verse-Virtual