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Poetry 2 Fall 2020

 

Conversation With Cacao
     by R.Gerry Fabian

 

She tells me
that she needs
a new language.
The one we use
is not capable
of expressing
the severity 
of protruded pain.
 
She had been so vulnerable
in giving her helpless heart.
She placed no restrictions
and now feels
as discarded as a dust relic.
She is becoming
something to be shelved.
She exudes
an erratic melody
of her own flaws.
 
She wants me to hold her
yet is wary
that my fingers hold
another unknown poison.
So she keeps
an aching distance
with words
that smell of semisweet chocolate
but linger with
a broken bittersweet taste.
 
 
Bio: R. Gerry Fabian is a retired English instructor. As a poet and novelist,he has been publishing his writing since 1972 in various literary magazines. His web page is https://rgerryfabian.wordpress.com He has published three books of his published poems, Parallels, Coming Out Of The Atlantic and Electronic Forecasts. In addition, he has published three novels. They are Getting Lucky (The Story), Memphis Masquerade, and Seventh Sense.  All these books are available both as ebooks and paperbacks at all publishers including Amazon, Apple Books and Barnes and Noble.  He lives in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.
 
 
 

 

WHAT  WE  CAN'T  DO

     by  Vern Fein

What if one woman and I
were left on the Earth
to propagate the human race?
What if we couldn’t invent anything—
from a battery to a rocket,
cure small pox?

Adam and Eve didn’t bother
with math or technology,
the ground watered itself,
luscious fruit to pluck,
the Four Rivers pure,
animals best friends.

When they left the Garden,
they needed it all,
progressed into civilization,
the last few hundred years,
bombs, machine guns, tanks,
trains, automobiles planes,
skyrocketing technology,
computers, the Internet, I-Phones,
from agrarian to urban,
plowing to the moon.

I couldn’t create any of these things—
a failed bird house in shop class—
my dear wife hardly better.
I write poems,
read on the poetry circuit.
She’s a garden artist.
We can’t develop a circuit for anything
or a chip,  
would never have thought of atoms,
become our hero Salk.
Glad there have been billions
to invent these marvels.

Without the weapons though,
please, without the weapons,
but, it seems, those come with the territory.

 

Bio: A retired special education teacher, Vern Fein started writing poems just a few years ago and has published over one hundred poems on over sixty sites, a few being: *82 Review, The Literary Nest, Gyroscope Review, Courtship of Winds, Ariel Chart, Broadkill Review, Soft Cartel, and River and South. This avocation has become a delight in life, particularly during the Covid isolation.

 

The Clock Ticks

    by  Patrick O" Shea

 

The clock ticks as the day passes by, and the people gather round in their attempt to hear the sound of

Breathing in the ward, the wheels click over the floor

As another bed is rolled in with another person lying there, the days begin to seem to be just the same,

But they can never be the same again, there is a silence,

A silence that now gathers like shadows gather as the sun goes down, moving across the walls of those

Places in which so many now must be, lighted by the tragedy

That is now unfolding in so many places around the world, the faces caught on some television stations

So it is known who has gone away on their own, without a friendly face around.

 

There is a begging in the voices that you hear asking those who perhaps do not care, to please care, to

Take a moment to think beyond their limited way of living,

To take a moment beyond their limited way of seeing, and to understand that those who are taken away

May be their sister, their brother, their mother, or their lover,

There is a simplicity in the grief that you see, it is a loss of so many, a woman walks away on a street in

Spain after her father has died, he died alone without her touch,

And you see the shoulders slumping on her body as she walks away, the loss unexplainable to her, she

Knows they cannot speak or laugh together again, and she is so very alone.

 

There is pain on so many streets in the world now, and it is as if a tsunami of grief is pushing all before it

In a merciless wave of loss, breaking upon every person on the street,

There is no cleansing in this tsunami of any rubbish on the street, or of any trees that have stood for so

Many years, there is only the loss of more bodies swept away in a pandemic,

In the spring of the year or the fall that may be experienced in another place, where beauty should be

Now experienced, it is difficult for so many to remember beauty,

There is only loss that is being shared, death being known, burials in lonely mass graves, and the world is

Now caught in a new time in this world, as the clock ticks.

Patrick O’Shea

 

13 April, 2020

 

Bio: Patrick O’Shea is  living in Rijswijk Holland. Travel this year has been rather limited by the virus springing up all over the world, but he is still hoping to walk some of the Camino from Pamplona to Santiago de Compostela in September 2020. His  writing of late, has been impacted a bit by the situation with the virus, and not quite as much being produced, but keep on trying. The garden is keeping him busy, and he gets comfort from reading, and listening to music.

 

 

 

   

Wait...Is Summer Over?

     by Linda Thornton Peterson

 

Voice weakening

Vision dimming

Hearing fading

Hair thinning

Color missing

 

Statue shortening

Shoulders slouching

Balance swaying

—to and fro

Pace slowing

Reactions too

 

Memory

           — Weakening

                         Dimming 

                                       Fading

         Missing              

 

Bio:  Linda Thornton Peterson, a Louisiana native, retired from Northern Illinois University as a psychotherapist and teacher. Her short stories have appeared in The Green Silk Journal and Flash Fiction Magazine. Poetry publications include: The Green Silk Journal, The Hanging Moss Journal, the Western Colorado University Journal and Northern Illinois University Journals. She won an NIU faculty poetry award and is a founding member of two DeKalb writers’ groups. She was an Associated Press stringer photographer and an art teacher; she continues to exhibit her art and write.