Thanks to a gorgeous stream of entries, WIZ’s 2011 Spring Poetry Runoff Celebration ran even deeper into the season than did last year’s. And indeed, this year’s Runoff has been an inspiring show of green and fertile language, above and beyond what I had hoped. In fact, I’ve been wowed, not just by the craftsmanship [...]
I could never make something so perfect, so precise
As midway between summer’s cauldron fire and winter’s ice
A revving of the engines, an adjustment of the eyes
From bleak to bright and coloured light. In short, it’s rather nice.
This season is a halfway house, an opening of blinds,
A rooster season, and a rood awakening of mind
To worlds [...]
At last the world leans the cobbled street
between Church and City Hall
in line with the sun.
The host of sparrows in the barren aralia vines
catches fire again, flickering and dancing so quick,
like a scaffolding of glad candles.
The forsythia hedge at the Mansion gate–
yesterday a row of tattered sticks,
today a bustling brass parade.
And we, the grey coated [...]
When the bobcat
flashed angrily through
the headlights
of Alan’s famous
Mustang,
we sliced the
silence to a primitive
stop and wild
eyed,
grabbed the
.22s resting cold and
anxious on
the back seat
Like
hunting hawks
dove
from the car
wings folded
The canyon echoed the crack
crack, crack as we fired
at shadows
We didn’t know then,
the cat
could
have cured us
and the quiet Spring night
soothed
our burning
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To read more of Steve’s poetry and see his bio, [...]
Warming rays over frost kissed flowers
Bids cold love depart into a smiling sun,
Enticed thereby to air and cloudy bowers
Where icy winds and snow have lately run.
An earth in step with brimming clouds above
Renews a onetime halted suitor’s dance,
Accepting rain’s entreating poet’s love,
Penned once again in arcing rainbow’s glance.
Cold voices from this blanket world rise up
To [...]
Palm hands
applaud the wind
that brings
lost cloud ships
slowing
to toss extra weight overboard
Rocky hills
blush green from
unexpected rain
Shy poppies
bloom
in spite of themselves.
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To read Judith’s bio and more of her poetry on WIZ go here, here, and here.
*contest entry*
She painted herself
into the landscape. On
a canvas she had
magicked from deep-self,
April sunlight streamed
from the clouds
in spectacular, uncanny, rays—
immaterial matter,
soul stuff made flesh.
She brought it to her
father who pointed out
how she should have
painted the sunbeams with
more yellow—
pointing to a maudlin
mountain scene,
hung ceremoniously on
a well-manicured wall—
an oil anyone could have techniqued
with hackneyed accuracy. That’s
how it should be [...]
On the warm late Spring shore, late
in a lunar glow,
he stood looking at the waves
trooping slowly, relentlessly into the cove
He stood wondering about the strings
of which some say he was made
Of what tidal forces were they drawn?
What sort of other moon forced him
into existence by its orbit around . . . what?
He placed his foot [...]
A robin arrived early spring with
snow on his breast and the
moon in his eyes heavier
than the moon in the sky.
He took his rest on my
gaunt apple tree and
the robin’s winter melody
began to haunt me, he
sang every day for twelve
days and on each day
an apple grew. I watched
him from the window.
The moon in my eyes
escaped with [...]
(after reading “Deer in the City” by Patricia Karamesines)
Deer rise up from the page
Like the walls of stone houses from the Mesa
As we top a rise on our drive across the Mesa
A few years after fire drove across
Uncovering new pots, new sites
The stone houses uncovered old memory
Older than the 40-odd years I have longed for [...]