2009 Monthly Themed Poems

JUNE
Answer the Phone

Before telephones the dead sent letters
sheets of tissue so thin

a hand passed through them like smoke.
They dried the tongue like warm red wine,

glittered our dreams into fragments.

Now the dead use the phone like everyone else;
they ring once and wait. We press the receiver

to our ears, hear the long static hum,

faint clicks and breaths,
explanations and descriptions. They want one

thing only, to tell us what they saw
when one light went out

and another turned on. We want to
show them the pictures we've taken

since they left us: that cathedral in central Europe;
the jellyfish at a California aquarium.

We forget what we needed to tell the dead
as we rush too quickly from sleep.

Their letters stopped coming years ago.

We wait by the phone.

Erica Goss

Dusty Miller Man...

I used to work in Berkeley and San Francisco by the sea,

now I’m a family gardener and a former shadow of me...

I can trim your Dusty Millers, dead-head your roses too,

I can work from coast to coast and do what I have to do...

I’m not your average layoffee

with nothing up my sleeve,

I could usually re-invent myself

when a company said it was time to leave...

I can mend a broken heart and repair a shoe or two,

I can do what I have to do to brighten a day for you...

I’m a handy kind of guy along a garden walk,

crows in tow know where to go and include me when they talk...

I used to work in Berkeley and San Francisco by the sea,

now I’m a family gardener and a former shadow of me...

I can trim your Dusty Millers, dead-head your roses too,

I can work from coast to coast and do what I have to do...

I’m a Dusty Miller Man...

©Peter Bray, 6/9/10 All rights reserved

Arson

Not impoverished

by time’s slow embezzlement—

the daily withdrawal

of memory’s deposits.

Not hit by the speeding train

of death, rarely credited

for its mercy. Her mind

burns itself out. Madness

smoldering. Sparking.

Flames leaping synapse

to synapse, across wood beams

drenched in kerosene, leaving

a blackened shell of mother love

and two girls dead in the blaze.

Alarie Tennille

poem previously published in Margie 2008

Summer Daze

　

Faster than

    a darting damselfly

        summer days flit by

hover over Shasta daisies

    bright in midday glare

        then sink quickly behind

sunbaked Sonoma Mountain

    leaving warm stones

        beneath my bare feet.

Arlene L. Mandell

Santa Rosa, CA

poetessxyz@sbcglobal.net

**********************************************************
Dedicated to Rosa Parks
who went to her final glory

October 24, 2005.

Southern Breeze

Summertime in the south

was slow with thick wet air

smell of magnolia blossoms

fragrant mint grew in yards

Swamp-coolers and overhead fans

moved like molasses poured over fritters

Black tea, sweet and well iced

hushpuppies served with syrup

grits drenched with butter, on the side

Where sensible white-folks with means

hired colored women with hungry children

for pennies on the dollar to do their bidding

Syndicated Amos and Andy Shows

played by under-employed black actors

brought peals of laughter across the South

on black and white televisions

in proper white homes

where blacks were allowed only as servants

White-hooded Klansmen still came by night

continued to burn crosses

hang bitter crop reminders of hate

from white poplar trees

that Billy sang about at 78 r.p.m.

for whites and blacks to sway to

The time before Martin had his dream

that ended in a nation’s nightmare

Days when thousands of people marched

singing “We shall overcome”

and a tired working woman took her place

defiantly in history, just by sitting down

Cynthia Bryant (previously published in

No Time to Shoot the Poets (C)2005)

Smoothing Jagged Edges

　

Hissing surf presses pebbles

into shifting sand, fitting

fragments tightly together

a stained glass mosaic--black,

white, tan--separated by strands

of emerald seaweed.

I hold a pale glass triangle

turned by ten thousand waves

a frosted talisman to slip

into my pocket as the sun

slides below the horizon.

------

Arlene L. Mandell has been wandering beaches since she was a small girl: Rockaway and Coney Island in Brooklyn; South and East Hampton in Long Island, Bodega Bay in California.　Inspired by the sounds and tactile pleasures of the sea, she still fills her pockets with small treasures at every opportunity.

　