Category: Poetry (Page 1 of 26)

A Necessary Pause In Transmission

1 April 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Peter Devonald

Solace has a song for you, waiting, waiting, amongst the torrent.
If you don’t choose a day to relax your body will choose one for you.

Noise corrupts and absolute noise corrupts absolutely,
loud whirr of technology never stops, incessantly, ceaseless,

Instead sit in nature, listen, listen, to bird song and insects
reaffirm connections beautiful and obscure.

Take time to read, enjoy and endure your deeper self.
Be someone else, briefly, brilliant and captivating, memory.

Reconnect with friends, remember, remember, the times before
it all changed with vibrant neon, obsequious pleasures, glinting.

Recall the times before you weren’t connected to the miracles,
when simple pleasures were miracles enough to live exquisite.

You know what you really need, you always did, glimpsed
through endless noise and rain, you saw yourself, standing there.

The noise can wait a week without you, trust me, believe in me,
believe in silence, the seas, sagacious shift to embrace serenity.

Peter Devonald is winner of two Heart Of Heatons Awards, Waltham Forest Poetry and joint winner of FofHCS Poetry Award 2023. He has been published extensively and has two Best Of Net nominations. Poet in residence at HAUS-A-REST. Visit www.scriptfirst.com or https://www.facebook.com/pdevonald.

The Block

1 April 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Richard Higgins

The keyboard avoids my fingers’ touch
as if words I need are in its clutch.

My pen sits unused without a care
and lined notebook pages blankly stare.

Neurons fire on an unrelated task
ignoring the questions that I ask.

I have a great story here to tell
but too many memories to quell.

Richard Higgins retired from the nuclear operations business after 50 years and became a writer. He lives in the Detroit Metro area. This is his first published poem.

This April

1 April 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Michael Carrino

Time can be a gentle quiz a dissonant tin drum
Songbirds are silent

It continues to rain Every village road is now
a branch of the river

The past is a vintage red wine
in some dark cellar

The future might only be
black grapes

wasting on a vine as another
ash-stained cloud

creates an illusion Beyond
the slate gray lake

every mountain must be burning

Michael Carrino was co-founder and poetry editor of SUNY Plattsburgh’s literary journal, Saranac Review. He has had nine books of poetry published, most recently, In No Hurry (Kelsay Books, 2021) and Natural Light (Kelsay Books, 2023), as well as individual poems in numerous journals and reviews.

Everything You’ve Ever Loved

1 April 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Robin Greene

Forty years have passed, and this morning you find yourself
alone at sunrise—red and orange overtaking the forested
mountain in front of you, as you sit there, as early light
opens the day, turning it into something mutable.

Most of your life is behind you, but sitting there
on that old wicker chair, you hear a mourning dove’s
coo from a distant tree as a murder of black crows
sweeps the sky. Only then, you remember the midwife

lifting your firstborn from your body—his initial cry marking
the next two decades of your life—a life now almost over.
Then, you’re at a hospital, hearing your mother’s labored
breathing as she lies there, covered in white blankets,

mouth open, eyes closed, and you encourage her release.
Forty years dissolve into weightless memory on this chair,
as you realize that everything you’ve ever loved will leave you,
and that the cooing of the mourning dove is not so premature.

Robin Greene is a former English professor and current part-time yoga and writing instructor, living in NC. She’s published five books: Real Birth: Women Share Their Stories (nonfiction Kindle bestseller); A Shelf Life of Fire (novel); Lateral Drift (poetry); Memories of Light (poetry); and Augustus: Narrative of a Slave Woman (novel).

The Nest

1 April 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Barbara Santucci

For years I’ve watched the towhee build a nest
in the oak tree outside my kitchen window.
She weaves and weaves and never rests
until her home is tightly bound.
Where soon her eggs will lie in a perfection
only this master weaver can create.
Interwoven twigs rest in the branches
ready to shelter the wings of a newborn generation.
In winter, I cup the nest in my hands
and wonder how she knew the composition
that would fashion a home at her breast.

Does this mother know that her weaving
will be the wellspring for her young leaving?

Barbara Santucci has a Masters in Writing for Children from Vermont University and has published three picture books with the W. B. Eerdmans Books for Young Readers. She also has several poems in poetry journals.

Churning

1 April 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Robbie Hess

The sun will rise again tomorrow,
but I’m thinking of my dad tonight
churning the butter of my sorrow.

He beamed a peppery amber glow,
and knew words that made broken hearts all right:
The sun will rise again tomorrow.

He taught me about the bayou willow,
and that gravy rests on the onion’s might,
churning the butter of my sorrow.

Now he is gone, and I am hollow
as an egg without a yolk or white.
The sun will rise again tomorrow.

I sprinkle his ashes in shallow
swamp water and begin to write,
churning the butter of my sorrow.

I wish we’d had more time to borrow.
My heart weeps over this forlorn fight.
The sun will rise again tomorrow,
churning the butter of my sorrow.

Robbie Hess is a Southern poet, and a recent graduate of The University of Alabama.

Photo by Vijayalakshmi Nidugondi on Unsplash

Her September Familiar

1 April 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Sharon Whitehill

Now is the season when hummingbirds vanish,
daylight dwindles, and the leaves fall,

a strange season of endings and losses,
colors fading to gray with a blackness behind.

A particular sorrow for her, this heartache,
even if shared by many, akin to the sky grief we feel

at losing the stars, even the brightest invisible now
everywhere but the most rural night skies.

Though more personal, too: a growing awareness
of how fragile her loved ones, family and friends,

this lingering grief for those absent, now or forever,
her people. As precious and ever-present as the invisible stars,

essential to her as signal fires in a storm,
yet everything seems, everything is, so precarious.

Each year it comes, this melancholy, her familiar,
not with the surprise of a window thrown suddenly open

to weather but as her September companion.
Until one day, down the road, it departs to the rattling call

of sandhill cranes overhead, a flurry of cedar waxwings,
and a pair of fawns still dressed in their white polka dots.

Sharon Whitehill is a retired English professor now living in Port Charlotte, Florida. In addition to poems published in various literary magazines, her publications include two scholarly biographies, two memoirs, two poetry chapbooks, and a full collection of poems. Her chapbook, THIS SAD AND TENDER TIME, is due winter 2024.

Another One Gone South

1 March 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Brian C. Billings

In the great Northeast,
I’ve soaked in rain;
I’ve chilled in snow.
I’ve had enough.
It’s time to go
to the water-strained Southwest,
where it’s best
to feel the kiss
of a dry metropolis
and bake to overdone
in the sun.

Abandoning myself to thirst,
I’ll brand myself the first
among the downward strays
who seek hot, vulnerable days.

Farewell to risk
when weather’s brisk
and tax that bites like a basilisk.

Farewell to rent
that puts a dent
in budgets that were all well-meant.

Farewell to bunkers.
No one hunkers
in the land of drills and junkers.

I’ll learn how to make do with less
in my arid new address.
Among the scrub I’ll decompress.

Sunscreen’s become my safest bet
for coping with the constant threat
of chaos where the climate’s wet.

Brian C. Billings is a professor of drama and English at Texas A&M University-Texarkana. His work has appeared in such journals as Ancient Paths, Antietam Review, The Bluebird Word, Confrontation, Evening Street Review, Glacial Hills Review, and Poems and Plays. Publishers for his scripts include Eldridge Publishing and Heuer Publishing. Read earlier poems from last March and December in The Bluebird Word.

March Weather

1 March 2024 / Editor

Poetry by DS Maolalai

the sun rolls like marbles;
makes passage down
georges st. the sun
looks in windows
at old hanging clothes,
aging to pale
bleached out
detail. I roll
with the sun
and against
in a pattern. move
between traffic
and dodge
around passing
pedestrians.
drink coffee
in this early
march weather.
this first
dusty day
of the year.

DS Maolalai‘s poetry has been nominated twelve times for BOTN, ten for the Pushcart and once for the Forward Prize, and has been released in three collections, most recently Noble Rot (Turas Press, 2022). The author’s poem The Lawsuit was one of The Bluebird Word‘s early selections in the inaugural February 2022 issue.

Birthplace

1 March 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Alexander Etheridge

—for W.S. Merwin

Out under clouds in the broad wheatfield
is a certain breed of silence
where only the perfectly hushed
give voice
Wind through the stalks
A sound of colors blending everywhere
in fine webs of shadow and light

After hours here you can start to sense
God’s breathing
like slow shifts in the clockwork
of ancient life
Then you may leave your body

as you lie in the delicate wheat
to return and find yourself
new once more
as you were long ago

your eyes wide
in the freshly formed world

Alexander Etheridge’s poems have been featured in The Potomac Review, Museum of Americana, Welter Journal, The Cafe Review, Abridged Magazine, Susurrus Magazine, The Journal, and many others. He was the winner of the Struck Match Poetry Prize. He is the author of God Said Fire (2023) and Snowfire and Home (Belle Point Press, 2024).

Category: Poetry (Page 1 of 26)

A Necessary Pause In Transmission

The Block

This April

Everything You’ve Ever Loved

The Nest

Churning

Her September Familiar

Another One Gone South

March Weather

Birthplace

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