The Garden of Verse: Magic Moments in Verse-Virtual's December 2020 Issue

Is the fraught year 2020 actually coming to end? 

A troubling year ends on a high note for the poets who contributed some of the year's best work to December issue of the online journal "Verse-Virtual," which every months publishes new work by some 50 contributors. Here are a few of the poems that offered word magic in the waning days of 2020.

Among the poems in the December issue that got deeply inside me and stayed there are two poems by Steve Klepetar. “Thin Air” speaks to the  Election Day anxiety many of us felt (I did: trying to decide whether to flee to Costa Rica), but takes us to a fantastically dark place made beautiful by its depiction. It’s hard to call out the great lines here –

“Your sister hides in the attic.

She has broken the necks 

on all her dolls.

There will be much to discuss.”—

for example; there are so many of them, and they build on one another. The

fractured dolls follow:  

“Your father has limped home late.

His briefcase has torn, his shirt 

hangs in rags. Could it be dogs 

again, or the human gang?”

It’s the ‘human gang’ that’s really scary, isn’t it?

The second poem “Reading Quantum Physics and the End of the World," 

takes us to a similar place. Though the atmosphere is rarified, the landing 

is familiar: 

“But now I have a headache and my Facebook friends/ are 

weeping. Those boots again, and now a rustling in the trees.”

I’m down with Tamara Madison’s strong poem on aging, "The Last Rain," for some of the same reasons. It addresses, beautifully, effectively, things I don’t even want to think about. So the poem sings them to our hearts: 

“Tonight when I hear the rain

slap the sidewalk as they say that it will,

I will stand in the street with my arms

outstretched and let my face go wet

and my clothes stick to my sides

because the way things are now,

this may be the last rain ever.”

 

Marilyn Taylor's poem “The Four Who Would Be Will” may well be the last, best words we will ever hear on the bizarro, upper-class-twit conspiracy theories over who ‘really’ wrote Shakespeare’s plays. The comic zingers keep coming, with the wit and agility that would have pleased the master.

 

“My Lord Francis Bacon, let’s open with you:

a scholar you were, and a scientist too;

you wrote of enlightenment, back in the day—

but nary a poem, and never a play.

It’s likely that we would be sadly mistaken

to look for a Hamlet along with our Bacon.”

 

A poem that serves Hamlet and Bacon on the same dish, the latter as a strong, stanza-clinching rhyme, deserves a bust in Westminster Abbey.

 

Michael Minassian’s poem "Dressing the Buddha” finds shadings of divinity in the street scenes of our secular existence. Even if finding Shakyamuni barefoot on the side of a road was only an “illusion,” the poem’s speaker takes him home for tea and a bowl of soup.

 

Both funny and profound, the poem winks at its metaphysical storyline, suggesting (without preaching) that we should care for someone in need because we never know when we might be driving an angel from our door.

 

The speaker gives the Buddha his favorite clothing “along with my wife’s warmest boots.” And she, arriving home, gets to the heart of the matter: “have you been meditating again?” but then embraces the same wisdom-with-humor philosophy:

 

“she ran after him and gave him her saffron

colored scarf, wrapping it gently twice

around his bare neck.”

 

That’s the bare neck we should all be seeking to save. 

 

Some poems are simply great stories, such as Sharon Waller Knutson’s poem about reliving old loves and losses, “I get an email from a former co-worker on a Montana newspaper in the mid 1960s.” The magic is in the detail: 

 

“It is two am and 44 below zero

and my 1956 Ford Thunderbird

won’t start and he has locked his keys

in his 1961 Chevy Impala. He kicks

in the window and his car chokes

and coughs but finally starts

and we slide over icy streets.”

If you haven’t done so already, you need to read the rest. 

The same is true of “Vietnam Vet,” a poem about a soldier who has

been reported dead. The story is told with spare gallows humor: 

“As the barber cuts his hair, he says:

Aren’t you that soldier on the news?”

The poignancy of these period particulars are the poetry.

These, and the many other fine poems in the December 2020 (my god, are we really at the end of this year?), are still up there for us to make a first, or subsequent, visit.

Here's the link Verse-Virtual December

  

The Garden of Verse: On the Theme of Gratitude, I'm Grateful for the December 2020 Issue of Verse-Virtual

My thanks to editor Jim Lewis for including three of my poems in the December 2020 issue of Verse-Virtual. The issue includes work by 60 poets, including strong efforts by Jefferson Carter, Steve Klepetar, Betsy Mars, Sarah White, Marilyn Taylor, Carole Stone, Barbara Crooker, Robert Wexelblatt... and so many others. 

Of my three poems in this issue, titled The Morning After the Morning After, There Will Be Consequences, and That November Feeling -- 

all written in the immediate aftermath of the Nov. 3 National Election, the one with the most impact for me is the first. "The Morning After the Morning After" refers to the changes in the outlook for the the final result in the 2 days following Election Day. When I went to bed on Election Day, the hosts on all the networks were speaking in dour tones about the strong Republican turnouts in the traditional "swing states" that would no doubt determine the result of the Presidential election. Texas and Florida, two states in which I'd had (foolish, it appears) hopes for the Democratic candidate were already in the wrong column. Others states, which had handed the Monster a victory in 2016 appeared to be following similar paths this year.... Well, you know all this. 

So on the "morning after" Election Day I was not feeling very good. Psychologically hung over. What would i do? Find another country to live in? Express my frustration with my country's affection with a veritable sick and evil nut-job by doing something stupid that I would immediately regret? Break a window somewhere?  

Happily, I began to reacquaint my paranoid brain with the pre-election prediction that the still uncounted mail-in votes were likely to run strongly Democratic. 

By that second "morning after," that trend was already well in evidence. Hence the emotional recovery in the poem that states in its first line, "I'm stepping from the ledge..." Here's the whole poem:

The Morning After the Morning After

I’m stepping back from the ledge.
The view from there is sickening,
a landscape roamed by entitled monsters
on whom we have pinned badges of honor 
for so much crapping on the landscape. 
 
Specimen days in a ravaged land:
sticks with dead flowers, stones with the faces
of people one might have known.
Today, a week from a killing freeze, 
the sun shines on the still-breathing leaves
and the compost bin keeps churning.
 
We walk the edges of a fault line
burned by the frost of a dead man’s embraces,
watching spellbound as the monster bleeds out,
but dare not yet descend
into the pit. 

To read the other poems, see Two More Poems 

To find poems by all 60 contributors to December's issue, 

see Poems and Articles 

Calendar Days: Anne and I Begin to Put Together Next Year's Calendar. Here Are Some Pages

 

Sonya in the Field: August 2020

We’ve emerged from the hills of Jug End into the paradise of the open fields 

Will butterflies appear, ex nihilo, in bursts of Super HD?

Birds sing like articulate brush-strokes from the fertile fingers of animators?

Flags fly in a sky of puffy clouds like the thoughts of heroes, doers, actors on the stage

of events: women 

Clouds pass above, like hungry souls praying for the gift of speech

 

Our daughter, a light into the future,

leads through fields of memories

All the green truth of the living world her truth now

What it means to live       this turn of the wheel

Images of Autumn: October 2020

Anne walks on a carpet of fallen leaves 

in the last days of autumn

From autumn to autumn,

from year to year,

the road leads on.

The leaves emerge in spring,

ripen in May

Hang large and languorous

in summer months.

Then turn the green blanket

of the forest to the farewell costume party of

October

Later, we find them underfoot

No need for the broom

We are walking the trail of the seasons

Each footfall landing on time 

What the Reeds See

The thing in itself. The thing in reflection.

Isn’t this what the painters have so often sought to do? Paint the light. And, as here,

the light on water. The reeds are not painting themselves. 

The water is painting them? Or the light.

Who can paint on water? The light. Only the light.

Who sees by light? Us. All of us. This sentient brotherhood. Deer drinking in a stream. Mallards floating by. Fish leaping to visible rumors of winged protein

All of us children   Of light 

Fog on the Marsh

A salt marsh by the shore. Impressions of a Great Egret and a couple of Mallards on an estuarial stream called Furnace Brook, as fog swirled through an afternoon disguised as some place else.

Who painted the colors? Who wielded the brush?

Concealment blew in the from cold saltwater, an arm of the sea stretching, a few hours lingering here

Inland, a five-minute stroll to the land of Everyday, blind to the occlusions of the shore.

Will that fuzzy white egret ever be the same? Will those mallards be taken back by their friends? Or hooted off

as the by-blows of some illusion?