Marjorie Moorhead’s inventive and satisfying poem “At the Feeder” is (almost) all about the birds. The poem describes the gang at the feeder:
“Crescent-shaped Blue Back White-bellied
Long Beak, and Yellowneck Stripe-feathered
join me at the eating spot. Large Bark-peck-pecker
comes too, then flies his blackwhite feathers red-head
back to trunk..”
But, if we’re paying attention (and I had to go back to the first lines) we notice something different about the perspective. The tip-off comes right at the start: “she has her black eyes out
again.”
She? With those long black eyes?... I think the birds are on to us.
On a much different subject, Marilyn Taylor’s sonnet “Posthumous Instructions” is simply (and literally) awe-inspiring. The title clearly announces the poem’s theme To choose one stanza:
“Let me liberate the elements
that fused in me the morning I was formed
and offer them again, as evidence
that my short visit left this place unharmed.”
…But we need to read them all
We're back to birds In Mark Alan di Martino’s “To a Warbler,” but here the speaker has discovered the need to explain the unseasonably early appearance of a (once) migratory bird to his daughter. In its inventive word music, the poem sings like, perhaps, the bird:
“Math-eaten, climate-singed, the change
came quick. In the still small span of a few lifted lifelines—
dour warnings bedamned—our tempest tossed, its leafless trust
trussed to the wings of a hymnal, taxidermied, back-taxed
to the be-yonder.”
I enjoyed all three excellent poems by David Graham. “Sea Turtle,” to choose one, is an unsentimental look at the lifestyle of an ancient life-form that persists by persisting, its challenges and responses rendered in aptly hard-bitten imagery:
“Your young will crawl toward the light
they think is moonlit sea—
pavement glittering with headlights.
A jeep will eat the eggs
ghost crabs cannot find. You'll butt
your nose raw on aquarium walls,
snap dangled fingers like snailshells.”
Alan Walowitz’s clever and eloquent poem “The nth degree,” thoughtfully provided an explanation of its title. While the poem’s first qualifying phrase – “in the meager math I learned” –captures my own background in this subject, the poem convinces me it knows what it's doing with this insight:
“I know from a close look
at those strange Celtic languages,
unless you have a vowel
it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference
between nth and nthng—“
and leaves me with a new appreciation for our own flexible, malleable alphabet: Let’s hear it for vowels!
And while we’re being philosophical, Robert Wexelblatt’s brilliant thought experiment “Six Mental Exercises” takes readers to faraway places that prove to be broadening, maybe even mind-refreshing, staycations. For example: “Pretend you are an ancient Chinese poet in ancient China.”
And “Pretend you are an ancient Chinese poet when and where you are living now…”
These are mind stretchers. As the poem suggests, in the first of these two, “the transfiguration of the smallest cloud [becomes]
more telling than a change of emperors…”
