Merlin by Gary Every

The snow is piled deep in the narrow canyon.

            No footsteps precede mine

            and I enjoy the solitude as snowflakes fall.

            The wind races ahead

            carrying whispers of the chill frost.

            Suddenly a pine tree stirs

            white powder sliding off the green branches

            as a small blue raptor launches.

            This hunter flies low and swift,

            straight towards me

            and so close that he passes through

            my breath vapor clouds

            parting the fog like a misty shroud,

            slicing my breath with his wings. 

            For just a brief instant we stare eye to eye

            he fierce, proud, merciless, and curious;

            me amazed and surprised,

            too slow with my camera,

            and glad that I am not a mouse or rabbit,

            wondering if a bird named after a wizard

            ever goes hunting for souls.

Gary Every, Arizona, USA

Birdwatchers by Chris Crittenden

we freeze as one into scarecrows,
enduring a brisk woolen day.
a char of juncos
in an orange copse taunts us.
soon we are blurry again,
cautious within Van Gogh fields,
hunkering like sandhill cranes
over snaky ground.

our clothes strive
to unleash themselves
in a muddle of fibrous fits;
but we slog with gusto, ankles
sucked by muddy mouths,
our binoculars leading us on
with the flair of rumors.

Dunson glasses an owl
scrunched in a crook like a forest gnome.
whatever it dreams,
our rude surprise will not cater.
we chatter at the jpeg moment
as it glares back at us with feline gall,
contemplating our apish ruckus
and the threat of crows.

later, through a swale
of gusty hisses, dead grass
shunts around our flappy gait.
wind seems to have scooped up all the birds,
cast them from our meander.
we watch precious wings
disperse with the aplomb of peppercorns
into a sunset roan.


Chris Crittenden, Maine, USA
 

Sunset and Sand

back

         drops

                   the walk of the herd.

Elephants on parade

for the picturesque view.  Panorama

and paranoia rule

this range, ruined by drought

and time.

                  To display emotion is

beneath them.  Their losses

are their own.  To remember,

they march . . . days . . . weeks . . . months

pass in silent . . . meditation?

Prayer?  Maybe

                          their movement

is the ideal.  Commemoration

through continuity.

What a thought to settle.  On

into night!

A J Huffman, Florida, USA

No later than tomorrow by Jan Harris

Persephone will place her hand on the ewe’s side
and feel the lamb quicken
snowdrops and alium will light the ground where she walks
her footsteps awakening snails, snakes,
a multitude of microbes
all stirring the earth-smell of spring.

*
As she slips through tomorrow and tomorrow
apple trees will shower Persephone’s hair with blossom
silken petals will barely-kiss soft skin
her hand will slice the lake’s reflection
as surely as salmon glide and leap
but the past leans over and casts its seeds.

No later than tomorrow
the lamb will become the ewe
snakes will slumber and snails burrow deep
before earth and water turn to stone
and in the darkness, swaddled in sorrow,
Persephone will close her eyes and sleep.


Jan Harris, UK

A Valley Fable by Kyle Hemmings

When I grow tired of the city's chalk downs & clay people
 who have disowned rock, I visit the girl melting in the tunnel valley,
her fragile fjord walls and her flat bottom ships. With a violent
avalanche of our pasts, our shoulders shudder, we hang ourselves
 over brooks, become reborn in a cirque. So high over a divide,
we chance standing on a terraced floor on one foot. She borrows
 a bridal veil from a mis-spent cloud. We blossom near a vast alluvial fan.
 We erode into the lips of a river that whispers hollow, that seeps
our sentiment into the hands of a woman longing for her children,
drowning in her reflection.


Kyle Hemmings, New Jersey, USA

Pelham Parkway on a Tuesday Night by Joseph Harker

March 28, 2011: an adolescent female Egyptian cobra escapes from the Bronx Zoo.

You might see her sliding along, painfully thin and supple,

keeping to where the ceramic wall adheres to the cement platform

in the semi-darkness. You might see her lift her head to look up

and down the tracks, sighing and flicking her forked tongue while

she waits: for this is her jailbreak, her Great Escape to see (at last!)

the sarcophagi at the Met and the cold monkeybar trees of Central Park,

to go to Times Square, and Broadway to finally see Aida, after waiting

so long. She's anxious to catch the downtown 5, and she asks you

(you, who are sitting terrified on the bench, afraid even to blink)

if you have the time, in that silky and slightly disaffected whisper.

A hint of an accent; an unspoken dare to be impolite. You check

your watch and tell her, and she just nods, wiggles her hood.

You might see her perk up as the telltale rumble quivers the girders.

You might see her sway her neck forward and suddenly

snap at something to her right, and you might catch a glimpse of

tail disappearing between her chapped lips, her throat curiously

swollen. And you think, well, that's one way to keep the rats down:

but you still creep onto a different car and hope she's not offended.

Joseph Harker, USA

Measured Movement by Kevin Cadwallender

This clock that keeps ticking
From the past to the future
As if time were linear
And we were not transient.

All the photographs mapping
This progression between
Now and then,
Behind and beyond,
Now and not now.

Haunted memories,
Clicked onto paper.
Tricks of light
And chemicals.

These hands that have
Existed consistently,
Insisting on
measured movement.

one sun that keeps burning
from the past to the future
as if stars were immortal
and not as transient as us.

all the astronomy of the ages,
charting the progression between
now and then,
behind and beyond,
now and not now.


Kevin Cadwallender, Scotland 

Not Another Death Poem by Janet Lynn Davis

–for Judy

This poem is not about death;
there are too many of those.
It is about everything else:
the long discussions of when
we were seven or twenty-two;
how we fancied being “great writers”
(both of us, even then);
how we were otherwise unalike,
you protesting in the streets,
      me watching,
you flirting with any and all
who would flirt back,
      me blushing,
you with the wild hair and umber eyes. 

It is about anything but now;
anything but the slow fading,
anything but the white lilies
that will cover you before
the next hint of frost on the meadow. 

Loch Raven Review, Vol. 1, No. 1, Fall 2005


Janet Lynn Davis,  Texas, USA

I Tried to Speak Hemingway by Daniel Dowe

I tried to speak Hemingway, but she wanted Faulkner.

I thought my words were spare and evocative and true

Little ominous blasts bursting from staccato notes.

But she heard my monosyllables,

My crafted and considered signposts.

And thought they were just vague and noncommittal

When I thought they were symphonies.

What she didn’t know was that to be florid,

To be languid and verbose,

To unleash the words in a volley of spray and sound,

To give her as many meanings as she might ever want,

To ponder, to cry over, to envelop her, to fill her with atmosphere,

Would rob me of my sense of beginning or end.

I’ve been in those Southern evenings,

Where the sweet kudzu conspires with jasmine

And wisteria and a muggy sunset to addle

Your brain and make you shinny up a sweet dialect

Only a debutante at an orange blossomed cotillion can love.

But I live in a world where straight lines meet straight corners

And up is never down.  

Too many words can mean too many circles,

And too many explanations can leave very deep holes.

I don’t mind lingering in the spaces between and above the words,

I don’t even mind repeating them,

well maybe once.

I just want truth and the certainty that comes from

Not having to know.

I just want the least to do the most.


Daniel Dowe, CT, USA

Whispers by Taiba Khan

After ages it seems
this day has come

You have, I have
recalled some things

And again a desire has cropped up in the heart
On the lips have halted all words

Never were we this helpless


Taiba Khan, India