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Poetry-Spring 2007-Pg-3
 
 
 

A Day in My Garden

 

             by Wenona Napolitano

 

On my knees hands deep in the soil

dirt under my fingernails

digging, digging, digging away

The pungent smell of earth mingled with

   the sweet smell of flowers

Hot sun beating down on my back

I plant the seeds and

    nature will take its course

    fill this barren space with life

    and color

Blooms and blossoms will paint

    this once dreary landscape

All day I work away until my knees

    are bruised and my back is aching

Yet at the end of the day I am happy

I feel a sense of accomplishment

I know I am creating something beautiful

 
 
Bio: Wenona Napolitano is a freelance writer, editor and poet living in Flint, Michigan. A small business owner and married mother of three, she is always busy. It is amazing she can find the time to write at all. Being a night person, she writes after everyone else is sleeping.
 
 

 




 

 THE ROUNDNESS OF LIGHT
     
                by  Richard Fein
 
Light shines from the fire within, thus envisioned St. Augustine.
An inborn flame that sparks the soul, warms and animates the body,
then blazes blindingly behind the eyes.
A cornucopia of radiance
that sets glowing shafts out to pierce a dark cosmos.
The Saint’s world view was the sum
of inner flames cast from the eyes
and the world’s reflection back into them.
So the medieval feared the evil eye,
for  like a  twisted carnival mirror
it warped all image of divine creation.
But then came Newton and Huygens
who with precise equations plucked the mystery from the eyes,
reducing them to holes in the skull, to indifferent doormen,
allowing in all manner of heavenly and hellish waves and photons.
Einstein first bent light beams.
And Heisenberg turned them full circle,
for the observer always alters the observed
in a  kaleidoscope of possibilities.
There’s a  matrimony of all that’s within and without us,
consecrated  by a wedding ring of light..
 
 Bio: Richard Fein was  a finalist in The 2004 Center for Book Arts Chapbook Competition. He has  been published in many web and print journals, such as: Oregon East Southern Humanities Review, Touchstone, Windsor Review, Maverick, Parnassus Literary Review, Small Pond, Kansas Quarterly, Blue Unicorn, Exquisite Corpse, and many others. He also has  an interest in digital photography and has published many of his photos.
Samples of his photography can be found on
http://www.pbase.com/bardofbyte   photo album.
 
 

 






Bamboo Flute

         by Nadine Gallo



in a forest alone following Pan

through the branches surrounded

by birds of every feather, cry,

I hear the resonance, undistilled,

wafts of wind passing over

us quietly.


Into a cave where voices charm

us, cast spells, whisper rumors

from long ago, under the sea,

beneath mountains,

riding on wave crests, secrets

concerning mortality.


A shattered life, reclaimed by

sound, miracled into eternity,,

take me where I want to be. Here's

my ticket, bought at the door,

listening to the lion's roar.

 

Bio: Nadine Gallo publishes online at nextbigwriter.com and has been accepted for publication by Journal of Irreproducible Results, Spring issue 07, is working on 2 novels, short stories & poems. Uses Brosna11 nom de plume on nbw.com , Runs a workshop for writers in Hadley, MA. Uses Amherst Writers Method. Former teacher, grandmother, M.A. English Lit from U. Mass. Amherst. 
 
 
 
zoo

  by Peter Schwartz

 

life is an afterlife.
and so we pet ourselves with syllogisms
betting if it has bones it weeps with declaration
stumbling through vivid moss

unnerved by the crickets
of our own doing.

near blood praying
for acupuncture.
still requires testimony
to fill the holes.

for no one can explain
the mechanics of ownership
that by which we leave pale crosses,
stripped down flagpoles, future rods.
which in turn make new holes

whether by swinging fearsome
over the reservoir jar,
shaking the nutshell stalks
and graves
for pocket fruit

or creating pairs of perfect bearings
for the pendulum
of an infinitely more
acceptable same

these old prodigal crutches
are thrown back
into the forest of translation
without a revolver

because I'm an exile
a human eyelid and race
by the perfume of chance
towards zeitgeist and commerce
and some new version
of forgiving

while meanwhile, the best imitations
of our portions go unserved
for there is no cornucopia of halves - not yet
life is an afterlife.

Bio:Peter Schwartz is the editor of 'eye' and the associate art editor of Mad Hatters' Review.  He has hundreds of publications in such journals as Porcupine, Epicenter, Color Wheel, and Vox.  His paintings can be found all over the Internet or directly at: www.sitrahahra.com.  He's nice.