The older I get the more my thoughts drift back to my beginnings. One of three new poems in the July 2021 issue of Verse-Virtual, "I Banged Up the Car" is a poem that reflects on how we express, or fail to express, emotions.
I Banged Up the Car
The tale I am hearing is all too nicey-nicey
Why is everybody crying?
And they keep telling each other that they love each other
as if this somehow were news,
or a message from the gods
My mother and I never once in our lives said
‘I love you’
I never used that word, not once in my young life
spoke the word aloud
until my high school girl friend positively made me say it
(on pain of not getting any)
Say You Love Me
Why?
Just say it. Or I’m going…
I never told my father anything
The word ‘love’ surely never arose in any single conversation
in our lives together,
in part because we never had any conversations
such as those I read in the tales of others
My parents never talked to each other either
(not about anything beyond present exigencies),
at least in the presence of younger ears
I just can’t do all this warm emotional expressiveness
And – crying?
Now that I am old I cry all the time – at movies, at the TV,
over lyrics penned two centuries ago,
and though nobody ever makes any kind of deal about
what I do,
the folks in the tale I’m hearing, both hale and hearty – and young –
keep breaking down
over practically nothing,
which somehow bothers me
Oh, to tell the truth,
Dad and I did have to talk a few times
It was after I banged up his car
Yeah, I did that…
more than once Also featured in the July Verse-Virtual, "Walking the Loop" is a poem about how hard it is to walk uphill when you're afraid you may be going downhill.
And "I Am Impressed by the Sheer Persistence of Nature" is a poem about trees and how we go on needing them. Here's a link to these two poems; Verse-Virtual July 2021
My thanks to the Eunoia Review for publishing this Covid Year poem. Titled "The Place of Birds," the poem stems from a visit to a nature sanctuary in Philadelphia during the lockdown Christmas of 2020. Here's the link: The Place of Birds
The Eunoia Review also published my short story "The Fire," about a long-ago bonding experience in a group house. Ah, youth.... Here's an excerpt from this story the story:
... I am unconscious in the early light of a summer morning when some kind of heavy, punishing noise begins pulsing through the house. Something (or somebody?) is banging on something somewhere in the house or slamming the ceiling underneath my bedroom floor.
Sleep still wants me back. I try hard to ignore the summons.
But I can’t get back to blessed oblivion for more than a moment or two before the pounding yanks my head awake again. Then stills for a second or two, then starts roaring up again. Pow-pow. Slap-slap. The briefest pause and then a harder Slam!
I have an image of some giant beating a rug. The strongest man in the world, Hercules the Housecleaner whaling a gigantic war mallet against Olympus’s thickest Oriental carpet.
Wham! Wham! Wham!
To read the rest, here's the link: The Fire
Finally, my poem "What You Will Find in the Woods" is in the latest issue (No. 55) of "The Dawntreader," an English quarterly journal devoted to the theme "of the mystic, landscape, myth, nature, legend, spirituality and love / concern for the environment," in the words of editor Dawn Bauling. The journal publishes only on paper, not online.
Here's the poem:
What You Will Find in the Woods
You will find something.
What you find in the woods
will be different from what anybody else finds
and even if somebody is walking along right beside you,
they will not find what you do,
not even if the one beside you is your lover or
your soul mate.
But on second thought go there alone
and when you find it,
and it finds you,
you will probably wish
to be alone with it.
It takes up a lot of space.
It is, even,
a little scary.
But you will know
it is yours.
To learn more about The Dawntreader see their website here indigodreams.co.uk/the-dawntreader/4563791666
Excelent reads, I dig it.
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