Poets in the pond:
Patricia Wellingham-Jones
CONTINUUM
(previously published in The Acorn, Spring 2001)
. . . and in the spring when the greens
are sun-flecked
with newness and the earth
opens her hungry loins for fresh seed,
all the promise of the world floats
from clear blue skies and the petals
on the apple tree shimmy
with hope and the farm boys
pursue joyously chased girls and the sun
spins its ripening rays
. . . and at summer's end seed pods burst
and rainbows
fill water-starved hoops in the sky and
the juices
flow and the farm boys are sweaty and
the girls
chaste no more and autumn's fading light
turns the leaves to red and dry brown
. . . and by winter's longest night when
owls huddle
under a snowy moon and robins get drunk
on pyracantha berries and hope
seems more than a globe's rotation away,
the farm boys hunker with the girls
by a glowing fire, the earth gapes
black and cold, and waits.
- Patricia Wellingham-Jones
Patricia Wellingham-Jones is a former
psychology researcher/writer, turned to writing short stories and poetry.
A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has been published in numerous
anthologies, journals, and internet magazines. Books are River Voices;
Don't Turn Away: Poems About Breast Cancer; and Labyrinth: Poems
& Prose. She lives in rural northern California. She was recently
named Feature Writer at www.OutStretch.net
e-mail:
Freada DillonSARGASSO
from the collection Southern By Birth:
Bi-Polar By the Grace of God
Winter whispers prickle flesh.
Sunrise dances dunes before us,
casts delicate hallows,
gilds the lighthouse.
Your tiny hand in mine,
we scavenge delight.
Sea treasures shawl the sand.
Recurring tempests subside
but calm is deceptive.
This place,
this peace will not last the season.
Red-sky morning already signals
destructive squalls.
You will leave.
Run headlong into life
while I sit in solitude,
awaiting courage to speak.
-Freada Dillon
Freada Dillon grew up in Pensacola, Florida,
and traveled the southern U.S. while raising 4 children. Currently living
in Metro-Atlanta, she has served on the staffs of Habitat for Humanity
in Atlanta, The Atlanta College of Art at Woodruff Arts Center and The
High Museum. She is the Poetry Editor for Beginnings Publishing.
e-mail:
Pug Marr
Lament of the Wolf
A day past and I shadowed you
behind the black screen
of a storm, saw you turn
from the rain and cower
amid a hiss of beaten leaves.
Has it become too much to be
even touched by the sky? Once,
we felled herds, now you tend
them in fields, and your tracks
sink pointed, like hooves. I sleep
the bear-months warm in laurel hells,
dream us again whispering the crooked
deer-paths, though you have become
to me a hard God: of sudden rifled
and slant-eyed in the blind. I call
silver from the mountain to light
the long slope of dark, deep, rising,
between us. What do we share now
but the moon and a path winding
ghost through the trees, fading
at the rails of the pasture fence?
- Pug Marr
Pug Marr is just some guy. His poetry deals
with stuff. He has posted on just
about every poetry board he knows of,
but each time with a different name,
personality, and voice. You probably know
him. He is who you think he is (and
also, he is not). He has been published,
but won't say where.
e-mail:
Linda Sue Park
Armchair Journey
Invited me to dance today--a word
I’d never met before. Right off
the page
it leapt and took me with it, through
a maze
of possibilities--a stone? a bird?
We took a turn or two,until I knew
its shape; a noun of venerable years.
It lacked the crisp intent or sleek veneers
of newer words, its patina imbued
with strata laid in other times and lands.
I tongued its strangeness: azimuth,
then found
a book to ask, its answer neatly bound
in columns first, released by clapping
hands
within the maze again--a twilit place
of arcs, horizons, planes! A double-flip
toward astrolabe--another breathless trip,
my terminus: the inner lip of space.
- Linda Sue Park
Hyphen
Its power
almost invisible--
The power to change
the parts of speech:
Mail order.
Mail-order bride.
The subtlety
of the disguised command:
Stay at home.
Stay-at-home mom.
The power to weld
across miles and years:
First-generation
Korean-American.
Etched with acid
into the skin
until the small
horizontal scar
becomes in the end
a badge.
- Linda Sue Park
Linda Sue Park won the 2002 Newbery Medal
for her third novel, A Single Shard. Her other novels are
SeeSaw Girl, The Kite Fighters, and When My Name Was Keoko,
published in March, 2002. She has five picture books forthcoming
and poetry and short fiction in journals both print and on-line.
A selection of her short fiction and poetry can be found at The Alsop
Review, http://www.alsopreview.com.
Visit her web site at: http://www.lindasuepark.com |
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