The Garden of Verse: Verse-Virtual Offers Poems for the First Month of a New Year, A Time of New Hopes and Sketchy Weather

My thanks to editor Jim Lewis for managing once again to put together a marvelous new edition of Verse-Virtual. January 2021 issue includes work by 66 poets, including new poems by Tom Montag (from his "The Woman in an Imaginary Painting" series), Jefferson Carter, Tricia Knoll, Michael Minassian, David Graham, Marilyn Taylor, Sylvia Cavanaugh, Steve Klepetar, Sharon Waller Knutson, Alan Walowitz and so many others.

The issue also includes my own poem "Calendar Days," a salute to the new year that takes a bittersweet look at the climatic possibilities of the upcoming months, particularly in atmospherically unpredictable New England.

Here’s my wintry forecast for the next three months:

Calendar Days

You cannot count on when the snows

will hide the ground and draw the flocks

January shifts its ground, confusing eager body clocks

Some days of rain refuse to freeze

Others tempt with softer breeze

February, much the same, is also March

Frost holds the ground, but seldom white

Some days are mild, the roots to stir

And thoughts of spring begin to whir

Then freezing spells turn hopes to spite

And then the month whose name is change

All months now are seeming March,

With chilly fingers in the wind

We stalk the sunny, sometime hours

Looking for foreshadowed flowers

To read the rest of the poem, my other two poems, and work by all poets in the January 2021 issue see

January 2021