Poems of Love, Sorrow, Remembrance and Earth's Enduring Beauty in September's Verse-Virtual

The September 2020 issue of Verse-Virtual, the online journal with a full bloom of new poems every month, takes us many places.  

Alan Walowitz, the issue's guest editor, recalls being “short-armed" by the local cop known as “Old Trench Coat” and ethnically profiled into a police line-up. The blues were looking for a guy who was "out jacking radios on Jewel" and who, we learn, looks Jewish. It's fall, the poem tells us, and

the light drops early
the way it does
this time of year in Queens

As it does throughout the Northeast, even in New England's Berkshire hills, where I'm writing this. But the light -- strong, indifferent, ascending, declining -- is always part of the picture, and I'm happy the poem, "Hardboiled," shows it to us here 

Verse-Virtual editor Jim Lewis recommends Steve Klepetar’s poem “Forgiving Hands,” a dreamy folk tale or parable, with a hint of magic realism. After drinking too much wine to take an older person to the hospital, the poem's "we" awake guiltily and discover that the older person up and cooking pasta. "every one of us was still alive," the poem tells us, then adds, perhaps chillingly, "or so we thought..." Read the rest in September 2020.

Jim Lewis also recommends Tamara Madison’s "The Nicest Man," a poem about a father’s surprising late-in-life discovery of a PBS role model. 

You can also find Lewis's own parable of our own pandemic times, "tell me why, tell me where," a tightly told tale of mask-wearing in a correctional setting. 

And three poems about an initial visit to Israel by Donna Hilbert, who says, “I miss the adventure of being in a country for the first time.” Altogether, the September issue features original work by 57 poets, a whale of a poetic haul. 

Finally, as you will not be surprised to learn, the issue includes three of my poems. 

I'll post below my own nostalgic ode to the swiftly passing season, "The Truth About 'Summer,'" a time of year I love and hope will linger in its best mellow, late-season fashion. I wrote this poem while listening to the instrumental song titled "Summer," written by Peter Kater.  

The Truth About 'Summer'*

Your gentle flutes, 
oh, too gentle for what we know of you
here on earth beneath your scorching eye 
How the wind blows! the rain lashes! 
We beg for your peace, implore the god of Weather,
that unending scroll of profane Revelations,
for the mercy of your milder face  
not only for mariners naked in the vulnerability 
of all who cannot walk on water,
 
but those who live by sewing life 
into the earth, and pray for rain, 
     but not too much,
who feed grass to beasts, dread bugs, pick infested leaves
off tomato plants,
Sing "Glory in the Morning" to Morning Glories 
Escape the heat in river sloughs,
Hunger for shorelines, 
for shallows lacking all creatures 
    that sting or bite,
Secure their harvests, their orchards, their vines, 
their trees with paper spells
     purchased from witch doctors 
 
Inspect their animals for signs of plague 
Protect their children from signs of plague 
Lift their prayers to the skies, 
stuff raspberries into the freezer 
when the growing is good
and fill all the world's vases, old wine bottles, occasional canteens, 
     and other vessels 
with the severed stems of beautiful things 
that cannot in the nature of things — 
     in the Nature of anything —
endure 
 
But listen! Listen to this fluted voice
of the praise singer,
Think of red fruit, and the dried and frozen sustenance of 
     winters, all those other days, 
those other seasons, 
when the sweetest song — song of fluted praise... 
floats immaculately away
 
*After Peter Kater's "Summer," in a version heard on Spotify  
08.05.20