October Poems: Verse-Virtual keeps turning a new page and revealing beautiful moments, like the colors of the autumn hills

My thanks to editor Jim Lewis for producing another excellent issue of Verse-Virtual, the online poetry community and monthly publication, that this month offers work by 46 poets. 

Here's what Jim has to say on how poets respond to the difficulties of a full-blown pandemic and the political chaos of our day, even as October, arguably the most inspiring of months, has begun to turn its autumn lights on us:

"Poets have always been active participants in the struggle to survive difficult times. We write to persuade. We write to denounce. We write to document. We write to challenge the wrongs that we see. What we do NOT do is throw up our hands and surrender to despair. "this is not the time to howl" is my personal poem of defiance. If yours has not been written yet, write it. Share it. Use the gift of your words to encourage everyone you can reach to stand up and be counted in this conflict."

As a contributing editor for Verse-Virtual, going on five years now, I have the fortunate opportunity to publish new work each month in the online journal. 

I have three poems, my standard quota, in the October issue. The first is my comic take (as I hope should be clear) on a trailside warning posted at Notch View, a beautiful nature preserve and one of my favorite woods-walking sites in Berkshire County,  Massachusetts.The poem plays on a misunderstanding of the sign's use of the phrase "classic style." The site managers are, of course, speaking of the trail's use by cross-country skiers.

The poem's speaker (that's me), as the poem indicates, is thinking about everything else to which the term 'classic style' might apply.  The poem begins this way:

Classical Style Only

My daughter slide-steps sideways 
down the path at Notchview Reservation,
arms akimbo, see-sawing in stately fashion
She’s ‘walking like an Egyptian,’
so the cant phrase goes,
because of course the trail sign clearly states:
“Classical Style Only”
I am trying to imagine a fashionable Athenian 
or Augustan way of proceeding
while lacking a toga, or a tunic,
or whatever cloaked sublimely homely Socrates
when he paced up and down the Agora
directing flights of reasoned disputation
to mind-unfogging peepholes into the ‘World of Forms,’

... 

The second poem "October Rain" attempts to describe some

of the characteristics of its subject, and, I hope, needs 

no further explanation. 

The final poem is an attempt to put into words the feelings

produced by an instrumental song entitled "As Times 

Change" by Kathryn Toyama that I find almost 

(but not quite) inexpressibly moving. 

It's at least my third try at offering a

written response to this piece of music, which 

(of course) does not require one. 

Please take a look. The poems can be found 

at Verse-Virtual Oct. 2020 

 

   

 

Poor harvests and other disappointments of the soul

So let this year be known as the year without tomatoes. That’s what they told me at the garden center when I offered my lament on the unwonted sparseness of my garden’s tomato crop: “Nobody has tomatoes.” Businesslike shake of the head. “This is the year without tomatoes.”

I did have many squash plants, which turned out – in a chastening demonstration of the foolish bravado of my ‘let a hundred flowers bloom’ philosophy of anarchistic gardening – to be all pumpkin plants. Which plants proceeded to take over the garden, string themselves from tomato pole to tomato pole (not that the underpopulated tomato plants were particularly in need of support to hold the weight of their nonexistent fruit), and develop the easily foreseeable rash of spotted white mildew disease which has spoiled my previous efforts to grow squashes in this garden. We do have a half dozen petite pumpkins, about the size of hardballs, only the largest one – smaller than a gym class spud ball – indisputably saying pumpkin to the casual observer. These winter squashes will ripen, but will get no bigger since their plants are succumbing to the white mildew epidemic, so I am working hard to stimulate a cutting edge fashion for decorator petite pumpkins.

I cut off the silky leaves of the squash plants when they develop chalky white spots, leaving behind the maimed yellow stalks which look like cracked piping to nowhere. I have changed the geometry of the vegetable garden several times already this summer, adding new seedlings, new rounds of bean seeds, encouraging the squash runners to use the metal funnel-shaped pea supports, then cutting them back when the leaves diseased. With dead or non-productive foliage removed, more sun gets in now, but for late August the pickings are thin. The basil plants, freed from competition for sun – once summer sun arrived in the very last days of July – have rebounded, growing bushy new leaves. My culinary daughter Sonya is here and harvests them aplenty. The skinny, mostly naked sweet pepper plants have begun to set tiny peppers, the largest maybe two inches long. Some are mere tiny green circles emerging from white flowers. But the tomato plants are not making new flowers and so to all appearances have closed the book on their miniscule haul of round red fruit.

So yesterday, finding myself in a local garden shop in search of herbs for our expanded “spice garden” (Sonya’s literary term for it), I came across vigorous, healthy potted tomato and pepper plants for a dollar apiece, already bearing more fruit on thick leafy branches than a dollar will buy in the grocery store, and snapped up a few. The two new tomato plants are ‘beefsteak,’ a variety I would not ordinarily choose because of its hubristic name, but their fat green offspring are a welcome sight. I looked forward to popping them in the ground and trusting in nature the rest of the way.

Now here’s the problem. I planned to pull out the current, moribund inhabitants of and re-use their stakes. However, when I give said post-productive plants a close, last look before yanking them, my tender heart imagines I spy new growth, a greener green, near the top of the main stem and reasons if there are new leaves then surely there may be new yellow flowers, and if flowers then fruit. Never mind we are speaking of Aug. 23, and when will this prophesied new fruit mature? I am a holdout for late season comebacks. A late-life daydream believer.

The old ones stay. I fit the three new fat plants in between. Sports writers would call it a late-season acquisition.