February - Poem 24

Sublimities  / Barbara Audet

“Lives of great men all remind us, We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us, Footprints on the sands of time …”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Search if you must but dare you find a woman, man today whose life’s sublime?
Transcendent over natural inclinations, not wayward from a noble path.
It’s convenient to profit, to abandon what poets cherished in a time gone by.
Where are those that set grand agendas, ideal swollen hearts ever in harm’s way,
Exalting bravery, in thought, and words, and action, others before self?
Few flash auroras, few burn purely in our current mass construction of the all for one endeavor.
But when they strike a justice-angered flame, are consumed by a starlike immolation,
these few who seek sublime achievement are best foot forward.
By generous risk-taking, those lit from within remind the rest that more is possible, good unchecked.
Our days demand we follow fresh-made footsteps, molded by the weight of bold mankind.
Otherwise, the sands of time are leveled flat, refusing to retain evidence of our passing.

On love / Bee Cordera

Missing you, someone I’ve never met
Is like missing a golden age 
I have yet to experience
But feels right at home.
It feels like the vitamin D
Missing from my body 
When it’s been cloudy
And snowy for two weeks straight.
It feels like the once prairie land
Missing bison wallows
Basins for holding rain 
Wherever the buffalo roam.
You say it’s like missing 
A phantom limb you never had.
We hope their we don’t turn
To dust before we see each other 
Again in this lifetime, but even then
If we do turn to dust
We are destined to meet as dust
Bunnies finally combining 
Into one universe. 

APPALACHIAN APPELLATION / Ashby Logan Hill

“I was wondering when you’d come back up to see me.”
Cornfields and newts, mountain river gulley salamander,
Hessian mercenary, coal miners and moonshine. The hills
in Ansbach seem to keep in same time, one day Pangea split,
and stopped in the city, traffic light waiting, a man in a
golden hat rides by on his bike, past Manuel’s Laundromat,
large chromium swoop and flowers, daffodils for handlebars,
and I sit there thinking — green light, pink and yellow
lady slippers, astringents of bear corn or squawroot and
Sassafras tooth, parasitic phosphorescence, hypothesis for
the phylogenetic trees, clade and sister taxa and cladogram —
I’ll soak my ghost pipe in corn whiskey and go dancing.
Brook trout, Darters, Bowfin, Lake Sturgeon, the wild wind.
At the light, I was reminded what magic grows of mountains.

Anxieties Turned Away  / Amy Marques

Though short
of happiness
speak
of true
justice
earnestly.

With anxieties turned away.

 Source Material: A Tale of Two Cities

Planet of Cheese  / Sonia Sophia Sura

The girl who visited
a planet
made only
of cheese
never did return…

Upon arrival, 
the planet was cheese,
not the girl.
But she had been
warned.

She brought pasta
and butter
and prepared
a fine course.

It was absolutely
wonderful 
to take from the
table,
and the chair,
and the fork. 

The shortage was
no issue
of cheese, but her
appetite was
poor. 

Day after day,
she ate her bed
and the floor, 

day after day,
she swallowed the plates
and the kitchen door,

day after day,
she ate and ate and ate
until she could no longer
stand straight. 

No wonder she was
alone,
anything
alive was
eaten soon after
it was born.

The longer she
stayed,
the larger she grew,
and I must tell you
the warning she’d received,
it’s an age-old proverb,
that you’ll become what
you eat…

The chairs disappeared,
she ate the spoons and the forks, 
the musical instruments,
the art and guitars…

All that was left
was a big stomach,
elbows and hands—
a larger planet of cheese,
with rings for arms…

If you don’t yet understand,
let me write this in
simple terms:

She ate the whole planet,
and became a new world. 

Swansong for a Horse (morning complaints)  / Samuel Spencer

I sit here this morning, able but unwanting.
The imaginary mountain of insurmountable
tedium towers over me a schoolyard
bully. I look up, unequal to the challenge –
the unavoidable consequence of saying yes
too many times. I am a horse long in the tooth
who has bitten off more than he could chew.