September Poems: A Time to Reap, and A Time to Worry

 

September. a time to reap a time to remember, a time to celebrate, a time to refrain from celebration... and as in the photo above, to watch the rain fall on the garden.

I have three poems in the September 2022 issue of Verse-Virtual, "Time Out," about catching Covid...

Here's the first stanza:

Time Out

Covid, we love you
Who else would tell us to spend days in bed,
loving the things we can do
when no one is watching,
no dates on the calendar, no meetings,
when we are fools together, apart, 
separate machines for living… 
Reading books and napping in different rooms
yet together in all that matters
Getting one’s ass in gear, eventually
Launching sticks up our nostrils
What wicked fun!

...

My poem "Goodbye, Summer" can by a conceptual stretch be judged a response to the issue's theme "A Time to Reap"... It begins this way:

Where would summer be if I didn’t pick the berries? 
Why would the flowers bloom
if I didn’t venture out to their domain and stare 

     at them each morning? 
(and afternoon, and evening, and…) 

...

And concludes:

It’s enough to love. It’s enough to have loved. 
I do not say goodbye to summer.
It is always summer. 
I do not say goodbye to summer love.
...
                        

Finally, my poem "One Sky," is a tough-love response to the planet's ongoing and accelerating climate crisis. And a stark exercise in finger-pointing at those who continue to ignore the Earth's existential crisis:

Lay down your weapons, soldiers of the night, 
and embrace your doom
We bury you in slag heaps, and in Old World cities 
encumbered with pyramidal monuments of discarded 

     trumpery, 
all the smog of China to feed the funeral pyres 
in which your bodies of earth give back to earth that

     which, ions and particulates, 

remains strong and fruitful
providing some fertilizer 
for whatever may come after 

...

To read these poems in their entirety see  Verse-Virtual September 

I also had a group of politically themed poems in the August issue of Verse-Virtual, titled "When in Rome" (re the history of the Roman Republic); "Social Round" (about July Fourth); and "Proscription List" (a response to America's Taliban-style Supreme Court).

You can find them here: Verse-Virtual August

Verse-Virtual editor Jim Lewis was also kind enough to post one of my poems from six years ago, along with one of his wonderful nature photos on Facebook.

You can find it here Osprey poem, pic