Dust of Snow

By Robert Frost

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
 A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

Holding Pattern I

By Julia Rose Lewis

 We are greeting,
greedily holding and hugging

he and I. I retreat to the beach
to read

beneath the umbrellas: yellow,
blue, green. Then

to the blue bench, looking to the parking lot
the beach lies to the left.

While I watch the end of the afternoon
he takes the flag down.

Fulfilling
long-time part-time island traditions,

the seagulls here are all called Herman,
for the man who listened to Captain Pollard’s tale.

I wore gray
on gray on faded denim

sea-stained and sand encrusted.
He passed over gray floor boards full

of splinters. I have been on the wrong side
of the cliffside for so long.

Here he was an ant
soldier in the war

he taught me was waged against the sand,
afterward I rolled up my jeans. Inside,

he paused beside
me to brush the hair from his eyes.

Learn all the stories the hotel has to tell,
I tell myself,

the little Pennsylvania girl with the man
who comes from the northeast

of Indiana, he points out the nearest
town on an atlas, his family farm

is too small to see.
He lets himself blush; he really

needs a headband. His beautiful hair
falls into his eyes and I allow

my fingers to follow. Yet,
I can’t taste yellow, only old salt.

Memorial Day to Labor Day,
I land

isle while away.
Could I love a place as I should

love a person?
He is

a guy with
a green soft-top Jeep Wrangler,

a permit to go out to Coatue,
a long picnic at Great Point,

Terrible teeth are meaningless
when kissing,

On hot sand and broken shells feet harden,
he has beastly feet;

I have reading hands.
He reaches for his reading glasses

as the sun burns through the fog
in the morning.

I’m leaving,
reaching out to hug him.

Where the seagulls are all called Herman,
We are good at hugg
ing.
A holding pattern
here we are as old as our beloved.


Julia Rose Lewis is a working towards her MFA at Kingston University London. She received her BA in Biology and Chemistry from Bryn Mawr College PA. She lives on Nantucket island and is a member of the Moors Poetry Collective of Nantucket.

Siren Song

By Margaret Atwood

This is the one song everyone
would like to learn: the song
that is irresistible:

the song that forces men
to leap overboard in squadrons
even though they see the beached skulls

the song nobody knows
because anyone who has heard it
is dead, and the others can't remember.

Shall I tell you the secret
and if I do, will you get me
out of this bird suit?

I don't enjoy it here
squatting on this island
looking picturesque and mythical

with these two feathery maniacs,
I don't enjoy singing
this trio, fatal and valuable.

I will tell the secret to you,
to you, only to you.
Come closer. This song

is a cry for help: Help me!
Only you, only you can,
you are unique

at last. Alas
it is a boring song
but it works every time.

Survival Course

By William Stafford

This is the grip, like this:
both hands. You can close
your eyes if you like. When I say,
"Now," it's time. Don't wait
or it's all over. But not
too soon, either just right.
Don't worry. Let's go.
Both hands.

An Abandoned Factory, Detroit

By Philip Levine

 The gates are chained, the barbed-wire fencing stands,
 An iron authority against the snow,
 And this grey monument to common sense
 Resists the weather. Fears of idle hands,
 Of protest, men in league, and of the slow
 Corrosion of their minds, still charge this fence.

 Beyond, through broken windows one can see 
Where the great presses paused between their strokes
 And thus remain, in air suspended, caught
 In the sure margin of eternity.
 The cast-iron wheels have stopped; one counts the spokes

 Which movement blurred, the struts inertia fought,
 And estimates the loss of human power,
 Experienced and slow, the loss of years,
 The gradual decay of dignity.
 Men lived within these foundries, hour by hour;

 Nothing they forged outlived the rusted gears
 Which might have served to grind their eulogy.

Ode to a Blizzard

By Tom Disch
 

O! wonderful for weight and whiteness!

       Ideolog whose absolutes

               Are always proven right

                      By white and then

               More white and white again,

       Winning the same argument year

After year by making the opposition

                            Disappear!

O! dear miniature of infinity with no

       End in sight and no snow-

             Flake exactly like

                      Another, all

             A little different no

       Matter how many may fall,

Just like our own DNA or the human face

                              Eternal!

O! still keep covering the street

       And sidewalks, cemeteries, even

               Our twice-shoveled drive,

                      And all that is alive,

               With geometries that sleet

       Will freeze into Death's

Impromptu vision of a heaven

                              Wholly white!

For we know who your sponsor is, whose will

       You so immensely serve,

               Whose chill is more severe

                      Than any here.

               Though his name may be unspoken,

       His commandments are unbroken,

And every monument that you erect

                              Belongs to him!

First Poem for You

By Kim Addonizio

I like to touch your tattoos in complete

darkness, when I can’t see them. I’m sure of

where they are, know by heart the neat

lines of lightning pulsing just above

your nipple, can find, as if by instinct, the blue

swirls of water on your shoulder where a serpent

twists, facing a dragon. When I pull you

to me, taking you until we’re spent

and quiet on the sheets, I love to kiss

the pictures in your skin. They’ll last until

you’re seared to ashes; whatever persists

or turns to pain between us, they will still

be there. Such permanence is terrifying.

So I touch them in the dark; but touch them, trying.

We grow accustomed to the Dark -

By Emily Dickinson

We grow accustomed to the Dark -
When Light is put away -
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Good bye -

A Moment - We Uncertain step
For newness of the night -
Then - fit our Vision to the Dark -
And meet the Road - erect -

And so of larger - Darknesses -
Those Evenings of the Brain -
When not a Moon disclose a sign -
Or Star - come out - within -

The Bravest - grope a little -
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead -
But as they learn to see -

Either the Darkness alters -
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight -
And Life steps almost straight.

I Need Trees

By Edward Nudelman
 

I need their birds
and dampened bark.
I need their loud swift
jingling and I need
their rare composure
over this moving
raucous house. I need
every angle triangulated,
every lean and turn
fully integrated.
My stilted speech
wavers hallelujahs
among their branches

This poem previously appeared in the Israeli newspaper Haeretz. 

You Came, Too

I came to the crowd seeking friends
I came to the crowd seeking love

I found you

You dried my tears
You shared my happiness
I came to the crowd to weep
I came to the crowd to laugh

I went from the crowd seeking you
I went from the crowd seeking me
I went from the crowd forever
You came, too

Blizzard

By William Carlos Williams

Snow:
years of anger following
hours that float idly down —
the blizzard
drifts its weight
deeper and deeper for three days
or sixty years, eh? Then
the sun! a clutter of
yellow and blue flakes —
Hairy looking trees stand out
in long alleys
over a wild solitude.
The man turns and there —
his solitary track stretched out
upon the world.

Snow

By Frederick Seidel
 

Snow is what it does.

It falls and it stays and it goes.

It melts and it is here somewhere.

We all will get there.

Love After Love

By Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Truant

By Margaret Hasse

Our high school principal wagged his finger
over two manila folders

lying on his desk, labeled with our names—

my boyfriend and me—

called to his office for skipping school.

The day before, we ditched Latin and world history

to chase shadows of clouds on a motorcycle.

We roared down rolling asphalt roads

through the Missouri River bottoms

beyond town, our heads emptied

of review tests and future plans.

We stopped on a dirt lane to hear

a meadowlark’s liquid song, smell

heart-break blossom of wild plum.

Beyond leaning fence posts and barbwire,

a tractor drew straight lines across the field

unfurling its cape of blackbirds.

Now forty years after that geography lesson

in spring, I remember the principal’s words.

How right he was in saying:

This will be part of

your permanent record. 

Trash

By Wendy Barker

“Trash,” he said, as we walked the line
between our almost-country properties.
Again I pointed, trees and shrubs
whose names I didn’t know, but “trash,”
he said again. Anything not oak.
That neighbor knew three kinds of trees:
live, pin, and Spanish oak. The rest should go.
And now I’ve lived here twenty years
I know how chainsaws take out everything
that isn’t oak, not just the junipers
that choke the other plants nearby, but also
Texas buckeyes, magenta blooming in
the spring, redbuds, huisachillo, sweet acacia.
Mexican persimmon’s bark blends velvet
grays and silky browns, its rounded leaves
bright yellow-green before the purple fruit
draws birds that nest on into June—
buntings and the wrens above the grasses,
gramas and the bluestems. November,
the seed heads in waves of burgundy, of red.
Our city council said they’d leave the trees
when clearing for the city hall. But like
that neighbor years ago, they meant
the oaks. Now they’ve called a meeting.
Oak wilt has hit the neighborhood, and
oaks are what we’re left with. Too much
construction, trimming of the trees, their
wounds not treated. The virus travels
through the maze of connecting roots.
And once a tree’s infected, it’s trash.

.

One River, One Boat

By Marjory Wentworth

I know there’s something better down the road.

– Elizabeth Alexander

Because our history is a knot

we try to unravel, while others

try to tighten it, we tire easily

and fray the cords that bind us.

The cord is a slow moving river,

spiraling across the land

in a succession of S’s,

splintering near the sea.

Picture us all, crowded onto a boat

at the last bend in the river:

watch children stepping off the school bus,

parents late for work, grandparents

fishing for favorite memories,

teachers tapping their desks

with red pens, firemen suiting up

to save us, nurses making rounds,

baristas grinding coffee beans,

dockworkers unloading apartment size

containers of computers and toys

from factories across the sea.

Every morning a different veteran

stands at the base of the bridge

holding a cardboard sign

with misspelled words and an empty cup.

In fields at daybreak, rows of migrant

farm workers standing on ladders, break open

iced peach blossoms; their breath rising

and resting above the frozen fields like clouds.

A jonboat drifts down the river.

Inside, a small boy lies on his back;

hand laced behind his head, he watches

stars fade from the sky and dreams.

Consider the prophet John, calling us

from the edge of the wilderness to name

the harm that has been done, to make it

plain, and enter the river and rise.

It is not about asking for forgiveness.

It is not about bowing our heads in shame;

because it all begins and ends here:

while workers unearth trenches

at Gadsden’s Wharf, where 100,000

Africans were imprisoned within brick walls

awaiting auction, death, or worse.

Where the dead were thrown into the water,

and the river clogged with corpses

has kept centuries of silence.

It is time to gather at the water’s edge,

and toss wreaths into this watery grave.

And it is time to praise the judge

who cleared George Stinney’s name,

seventy years after the fact,

we honor him; we pray.

Here, where the Confederate flag still flies

beside the Statehouse, haunted by our past,

conflicted about the future; at the heart

of it, we are at war with ourselves

huddled together on this boat

handed down to us – stuck

at the last bend of a wide river

splintering near the sea.

Regarding that First Sex in Brank's Field

By John Grey

The field was all weeds and ditches

where dark water sat, so mosquitoes could breed,

shaded by oaks that kept their own counsel

and the one standing wall of an abandoned farmhouse.

Her skin, sunburnt, flaked like paint,

as my ringers fumbled with bra strap

and pigeons chortled from a rickety fence,

dandelions sprouted between toes.

I do believe that places choose us;

like something overgrown and unclean

for overgrown and unclean moments in our lives.

We were unwitting designers. This was our design.

It was over fast like it almost never happened,

later shaken off like a childhood disease,

lying dormant, to reawaken later in life,

still a sickness but masquerading as a cure..

John Grey is an Australian born poet. Recently published in Oyez Review, Rockhurst Review and Spindrift with work upcoming in New Plains Review, Leading Edge and Louisiana Literature.   

It would be neat if with the New Year

By Jimmy Santiago Baca
for Miguel

It would be neat if with the New Year
I could leave my loneliness behind with the old year.
My leathery loneliness an old pair of work boots
my dog vigorously head-shakes back and forth in its jaws,
chews on for hours every day in my front yard—
rain, sun, snow, or wind
in bare feet, pondering my poem,
I’d look out my window and see that dirty pair of boots in the yard.

But my happiness depends so much on wearing those boots.

At the end of my day
while I’m in a chair listening to a Mexican corrido
I stare at my boots appreciating:
all the wrong roads we’ve taken, all the drug and whiskey houses
we’ve visited, and as the Mexican singer wails his pain,
I smile at my boots, understanding every note in his voice,
and strangers, when they see my boots rocking back and forth on my
feet
keeping beat to the song, see how
my boots are scuffed, tooth-marked, worn-soled.

I keep wearing them because they fit so good
and I need them, especially when I love so hard,
where I go up those boulder strewn trails,
where flowers crack rocks in their defiant love for the light.

On a New Year's Eve

By June Jordan

Infinity doesn't interest me

not altogether
anymore

I crawl and kneel and grub about
I beg and listen for

what can go away
(as easily as love)

or perish
like the children
running
hard on oneway streets/infinity
doesn't interest me

not anymore

not even
repetition your/my/eye-
lid or the colorings of sunrise
or all the sky excitement
added up

is not enough

to satisfy this lusting admiration that I feel
for
your brown arm before it
moves

MOVES
CHANGES UP

the temporary sacred
tales ago
first bikeride round the house
when you first saw a squat
opossum
carry babies on her back

opossum up
in the persimmon tree
you reeling toward
that natural
first
absurdity
with so much wonder still
it shakes your voice

the temporary is the sacred
takes me out

and even the stars and even the snow and even
the rain
do not amount to much unless these things submit to some disturbance
some derangement such
as when I yield myself/belonging
to your unmistaken
body

and let the powerful lock up the canyon/mountain
peaks the
hidden rivers/waterfalls the
deepdown minerals/the coalfields/goldfields
diamond mines close by the whoring ore
hot
at the center of the earth

spinning fast as numbers
I cannot imagine

let the world blot
obliterate remove so-
called
magnificence
so-called
almighty/fathomless and everlasting
treasures/
wealth
(whatever that may be)

it is this time
that matters

it is this history
I care about

the one we make together
awkward
inconsistent
as a lame cat on the loose
or quick as kids freed by the bell
or else as strictly
once
as only life must mean
a once upon a time

I have rejected propaganda teaching me
about the beautiful
the truly rare

(supposedly
the soft push of the ocean at the hushpoint of the shore
supposedly
the soft push of the ocean at the hushpoint of the shore
is beautiful
for instance)
but
the truly rare can stay out there

I have rejected that
abstraction that enormity
unless I see a dog walk on the beach/
a bird seize sandflies
or yourself
approach me
laughing out a sound to spoil
the pretty picture
make an uncontrolled
heartbeating memory
instead

I read the papers preaching on
that oil and oxygen
that redwoods and the evergreens
that trees the waters and the atmosphere
compile a final listing of the world in
short supply

but all alive and all the lives
persist perpetual
in jeopardy
persist
as scarce as every one of us
as difficult to find
or keep
as irreplaceable
as frail
as every one of us

and
as I watch your arm/your
brown arm
just before it moves

I know

all things are dear
that disappear

all things are dear
that disappear

The Shield of Faith

By Vachel Lindsay

The full moon is the Shield of Faith:
As long as it shall rise,
I know that Mystery comes again,
That Wonder never dies.

I know that Shadow has its place,
That Noon is not our goal,
That Heaven has non-official hours
To soothe and mend the soul;
That witchcraft can be angel-craft
And wizard deeds sublime;
That utmost darkness bears a flower,
Though long the budding-time.