Category: Poetry (Page 22 of 35)

The Hip

6 February 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Dawn L. C. Miller

Her ashes came to her grown daughters in a lovely box,
mahogany and rosewood,
accompanied by another box, containing
what had sustained her past the pain,
preserved her from disability,
entitled her to a parking permit.
It was her hip. Titanium and some ceramic.

Clarise and Susanne stared at it gleaming on the red velvet.
“It’s her hip,” murmured Clarise.
“Of course it is,” stated Susanne. “I can see that.”
“What are we supposed to do with it?” continued Clarise.
“Well, we can’t scatter it with her ashes. Someone might find it.”
They stared some more.
Together they debated all evening, agreeing on nothing.

The next morning it gleamed at them from the mantle.
Without looking at it,
in between angry silences,
and tears,
they talked.

The memories of places their mother had never been
floated into the morning light.
The seashore, when she stayed behind to take care of things at home.
The mountains she did not go with them to see:
no need to pay extra fare.
All the beauty and the music of far cities,
too expensive.
“Let’s take her there now!” they both said together.

And the journeys began.
Perched on a gunnel, their mother’s hip resounded with sea sounds.
Lost in the luggage for three days in Kenya,
Mother was found at last by a drug sniffing dog.
She rolled off into the snow at an Austrian ski resort,
but sat gleaming on a chair in the best restaurant in Paris
as her daughters laughed and toasted and remembered.

Dawn L. C. Miller has been writing poetry since childhood. Her poems have been published in Poetic Hours and Pegasus Review. She enjoys living on Maryland’s Eastern Shore with her two cats and orchids.

beach sand — Photo by Josh Sorenson on Pexels.com

Reflected Light

3 February 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Wendy Bloom

I saw the light reflecting on a piece of something buried in the loamy soil
When I looked closely, I realized it was a piece of myself
That I had buried away for darker days

Filled with darkness and despair
In a world filled with the tragic
It had fallen out of me, and I thought it was gone forever
But it was lying right in front of me

I grasped it in my hand
This shiny piece of myself
I turned it over and over
And rubbed my fingers against its slick surface

I decided to swallow it
To bring it back home to the center of my emptiness
To fill this hole with something that glistened
And sang beautiful music to my heart

It became one with me once again
And I smiled as I heard it laughing
Because it had been seeking me for so long
And had finally made its way back home

Wendy Bloom is an emerging writer who has written numerous poems, short stories, and essays on a wide variety of topics since childhood. She has been published in her local newspaper and “Reflected Light” is her first published poem.

Hiding from the Moon

26 January 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Ben Westlie

On your porch in our stupor
I kept turning to leave
your voice clung to me
holding me like my shadow.

I don’t know if I trembled
from the bitter temperatures
or how your heart kept speaking out
of turn. The green glowing in your irises

like small cauldrons. The yearning bones of your face.

I should’ve hidden from the moon
so there could be no shadows to latch onto.

I should have blamed my drunken blood.
I prayed for deafness upon my heart.

I should have sprinted down your porch stairs
until I reached another state.

My kind of love wasn’t in any of your mirrors.

Your face is what I see when snow becomes
stars from moonlight. When I hear the creak of old
wood on porches. When I see unruly auburn hair.

I turned around to the begging
of your face. A friend is all you wanted.

The moonlight made me beastly.
A feral creature raging and starving.

Ben Westlie holds an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Publications: Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets Under 25 edited by Naomi Shihab Nye, The Fourth River, Third Coast, Atlas and Alice, the tiny journal, Trampset, ArLiJo, Otis Nebula, WhimsicalPoet, DASH, MUSE, Speckled Trout Review, and Superpresent.

Stealing a Night from the Stars

24 January 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Clarence Allan Ebert

Chilled dusk shrouds the afternoon warmth. The sunset’s
pretty purpose draped in blue-haze. Night is coming on fast.

A firecracker bursts in the mouth of a frog. Shy stars crawl
out & realign their constellations. Water spirals down a polished

drain, pink with fresh blood. Curiosity cakes dry mud on loose
laces. Western clouds shaped like brains twin-mingle around

the chimney’s billow. Wafting through the boy’s flared nostrils
the ticklish smoke of parched brick. Peach-colored petals spoking

from a gerbera’s heart, droop under crystal dew. Blind
nightcrawlers slither desperate for longer lifetimes

beyond the flashlight’s halo. In dawn’s first amber wink
on the juniper and spruce the boy’s bait is hooked, a coffee can

of worms in hand. Wading from reed-bank to muddy pond, every
freckle on his cheek praying for another hot breath of sunshine.

His fishing rod in hand, he tosses the line. He’s a brave sum of all
his skinny parts, patient, though his heart’s on fire, anxious

for the bobber’s bob on the still black water. Here, where he caught
a twenty-four-inch bluegill worthy of a tale he’d tell.

Clarence Allan Ebert lives in Silver Spring, Md. He first published a poem in 1978 and since then hasn’t sat at the old oak writing desk in the parlor because he raised four children and spent his time litigating matters. Since COVID, he’s back in the parlor, writing away.

A Windy Day on Sans Souci Drive

21 January 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Gordon W. Mennenga

There go the garbage cans
And my neighbor’s loose-lipped lover
Duck! here comes the Public Library snowing pages
And oh those unwilling Clydesdales galloping sideways
Next the organ from St. John’s Church humming a flirty mystery hymn
A police car celebrating being quick and blue
Some little things: a wig without a woman, a man without a damn
Uncle Frank’s rabbit hutch then Uncle Frank

Did I see truth chasing gossip?
A cart and then a horse?
A shoal of minnows swimming the wind to big water
A flock of hallowed words
A herd of No Trespassing signs free at last
Six senators chasing their reputations
Then naked notes of happiness, regret and ecstasy
A rapturous tillerless sailboat
Bubbles of existentialism staying low to the ground

Algorithms and syllogisms galore
Smokey riffs from Nina, from Chet, Dinah and Billie
Boredom blown to ashes
Sid, the cardiologist, wearing a nice pair of loafers
Herds, coveys, caravans, gaggles, packs and pods
Me, I’m lifting off, not clinging but joining.

Gordon W. Mennenga has had work featured on NPR and published in the Bellingham Review, Epoch, Citron Review and other literary journals. He earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

A Birthday Meteor

19 January 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Jeff Burt

When the last bird-wing rose
and the bottom of the open window
became a bed for a creek of cold air
to enter the room, I saw a streak
of acetylene on the western edge of darkness
and found between my sixteenth-century Shakespeare
and my twenty-first century Einstein
a tussle between the optimistic flush of good omen
and scientific swagger that pronounces
a romantic stone a rock,
and I looked over your shoulder,
felt both lucky and fated to be with you,
and eyes lifted, wandered in the early stars
brushing against galactic wonder.

Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California, with his wife, alternating between dreams of fire evacuation and dreams of floods. He has contributed to Gold Man Review, Rabid Oak, Williwaw Journal, and others. Read earlier work from The Bluebird Word’s March 2022 Issue.

pink petaled flower — Photo by javier gonzalez on Pexels.com

Garden Reading

15 January 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Peter A. Witt

There was a time when nannies read
stories to children in the garden
on a spring day, when butterflies flitted
flower to flower, joined by humming
birds, the occasional bee.

She would read of princes and kings,
even fairies and dragons,
children’s eyes growing wide
with amazement and excitement.

Sometimes she’d stop, direct
her gaze to an old dog sleeping
in the shade, watching his belly
expand and fall, hoping he’d make it
through the heated summer until fall.

If she paused too long the children
would say, read us more, please,
read us some more, and she’d
turn the page and read more
of whatever adventure
her gaze had interrupted.

When the sun shifted and it became
too warm to continue, she’d bring
her charges inside where the cook
had prepared jelly sandwiches and
chocolate chip cookies for the children,
accompanied by a cold glass
of farm fresh milk.

As the children’s eyes grew weary,
nanny would settle them down
for a nap, then return to a shaded
place in the garden and read
her own book, accompanied
by the sleeping old dog.

Peter A. Witt is a poet, family history writer, active birder and photographer. Peter retired in 2015 from a 43 year university teaching and research career. He lives with his wife and Keeshond in Texas.

Later

14 January 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Robert Nisbet

By now he was washing his feet
with difficulty, ached a lot
most mornings, but always he walked,
first with the dog, then, when she’d gone,
striding alone round his domain.

It was a tour of inspection, decades
of shift and character and happening,
remembered and re-created.
Most treasured of all, the Common,
its cricket pitches and its trees.

His initials and Moira’s were carved,
fading, blurred but readable still,
in the mighty oak beside the seconds’ pitch.
His sons, the crowds, the matches,
once, the breathless pleasure
of his granddaughter’s single game.

Walking back, through unexceptional streets,
he would trawl his shoal of recollections,
alliances and families, time’s dole,
how Moira married the aircraftsman,
but that didn’t in the end gainsay
the good of all that happened otherwise.

Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet, a now-retired English teacher and college lecturer, who wrote short stories for forty years (with seven collections) and has now turned to poetry, being published widely in both Britain and the USA, where he is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee.

Snow

8 January 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Charlene Lyon

Snow is gravity pulling crystals
which knit into a blanket
tucked under
the sleeping trees.

A muffled, fluffy quiet.
Interrupted by scrunch scrunch boots
and the woodpecker knocking
on doors for brunch.

Charlene Lyon is a writer and poet from Cleveland, Ohio. Her work has appeared in Cleveland Magazine, Northern Ohio Live, Sun Newspapers and elsewhere. Her poetry will be featured in June as part of Standing Rock Cultural Arts’ 30th anniversary calendar in Kent, Ohio. She enjoys a good espresso and walking under trees with her beloved husband.

Hide and Seek with Robin

6 January 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Lilyth Coglan

He came to visit me in September as I pulled out the weeds
I was late to gardening this season
I felt him tutting at me under his red breast
Then he left for a while
Till November arrived
I guarded the cat away from him
Telling her “He is my Robin now stay away”
He bobs his head in and out the tree
Merrily bouncing along the fence
Always chirpy, always happy
I wondered why
Then I realise,
Winter is soon to arrive.

Lilyth Coglan is a poet and a writer from Hull in the UK. Locally she has been on the radio and news sharing poetry and spoken word, and was part of a female arts festival called She Festival in lock down 2020. She writes about mental health, life, love and politics.