You Me and Forever Love
The moonlight fails the thought prevails to live a lie and yet i spy through the keyhole of my being . Love lies there alone come out I say come out I pray and fill me so I may return your love to thee
David Jackson
The Whittlers Poem by Jackson
He leans forward,
there was a time, sonny
when I saw old men whittling
at the courthouse
sitting there on benches these men
were in overalls and wore
wool hats stained
from the sweat of
days spent in the heat,
in the field,
old grey wool hats
stained with work.
They whittled, these old men
and spat tobacco juice
on the courthouse steps
and sometimes they grabbed
their stubble’d chin
and waved a skinny finger
as they made a point about
“them this”
and “them that”
but mostly it was the weather
and the outlook for the weather
and how they could work no more
and they whittled at the courthouse
and could be seen on Saturday,
our day in town.
I can sometimes see those
old farmers
spitting tobacco juice,
whittling,
and one of them looks
not quite at me but
above,
“Is that your boy?”
by david michael jackson
Six Poems by Allison Grayhurst
Six Poems by Allison Grayhurst
Resolve
Burning in the middle
where the sickness gets in,
and my expression is foiled
by an inaudible aim.
Clouded like a bad fragrance
soaking into the pours, making it hard
to breathe. Hard to breathe in like
a petal crushed into a ball, or like a poem
with no testimony.
But I will not be taken in.
I will forge a path for my energy,
find new neighbours, something
unbroken to hold on to.
Take This!
Greed. Grief.
Screaming in the vacant aftermath
where such a scream contains, then releases
the toxins, separates the truth from the immobilizing
confusion of evil.
A smoke cloud of charred pride.
The lie of worry, the torn pages
of prophecy laid out,
caught by the wind, carried
toward God as this scream is
carried – a boxed burden
waved high
into a dull sky.
Without Soul
I felt the pressure between
my hands, drive through
my cortex and embrace
the tip of my brain with warmth.
It felt like fool’s gold, fake
but still providing glitter.
I felt twisted with unknowing,
degutted of all things I hold sacred.
And that was a coat over my corpse,
pennies placed over my eyes. That was
for me, forging forward
with no significance, with no discernable
regrets.
Rilke
You have given me
a stoic ideal and also
the comfort of knowing of the deepest dreamer’s fragility.
You – in the rain,
running with your rage, disappointment and poverty
until you reached the angels and the animals
who spoke to your uncertain heart and spilled
their clarity into you, into words for you that formed
like a reprieve from the monsters and the
chaos of failure. They held you in their
Sabbath for a moment of prayer, until
thrust again into your anguished wilderness, you sunk
away from joy, leaving behind an imprint of happening –
engrained in the realm of all else that ripples
intangible, eternal.
The Wall I Walk Through
Sophistication underneath
a set of sad droopy eyes.
The bland dream of civilization
slicing my fingers
as though my flesh was a watermelon.
I see no point but the point
of love, and the interaction between two
in love or just loving.
I see that a relationship can only happen
when both parties are giving –
all else is just in process
of passing.
Sculptor
So hard & regal
are the cry of your creations.
A sadness that moves
to be opened:
Stone stuck
movement. Watchers
in the distance
breathing out
your madness.
Old like
love, your roots
have no end. They burrow
with a strength no god
could hinder.
Your hands
outstretched
to the foreign dancer:
shrewd as passion,
life-filled
as the sea.
Some of the places my work has appeared in include Parabola (Alone & Together print issue summer 2012); Elephant Journal; Literary Orphans; Blue Fifth Review; The American Aesthetic; Agave Magazine; JuxtaProse Literary Magazine, Drunk Monkeys; Now Then Manchester; South Florida Arts Journal; Gris-Gris; The Muse – An International Journal of Poetry, Storm Cellar, morphrog (sister publication of Frogmore Papers); New Binary Press Anthology; The Brooklyn Voice; Straylight Literary Magazine (print); Chicago Record Magazine, The Milo Review; Foliate Oak Literary Magazine; The Antigonish Review; Dalhousie Review; The New Quarterly; Wascana Review; Poetry Nottingham International; The Cape Rock; Ayris; Journal of Contemporary Anglo-Scandinavian Poetry; The Toronto Quarterly; Fogged Clarity, Boston Poetry Magazine; Decanto; White Wall Review.
Allison Grayhurst is a member of the League of Canadian Poets. Three of her poems have been nominated for Sundress Publications “Best of the Net” 2015, and she has over 1050 poems published in more than 425 international journals and anthologies. Her book Somewhere Falling was published by Beach Holme Publishers, a Porcepic Book, in Vancouver in 1995. Since then she has published twelve other books of poetry and seven collections with Edge Unlimited Publishing. Prior to the publication of Somewhere Falling she had a poetry book published, Common Dream, and four chapbooks published by The Plowman. Her poetry chapbook The River is Blind was published by Ottawa publisher above/ground press December 2012. In 2014 her chapbook Surrogate Dharma was published by Kind of a Hurricane Press, Barometric Pressures Author Series. In 2015, her book No Raft – No Ocean was published by Scars Publications. More recently, her book Make the Wind was published in 2016 by Scars Publications. As well, her book Trial and Witness – selected poems, was published in 2016 by Creative Talents Unleashed (CTU Publishing Group). She is a vegan. She lives in Toronto with her family. She also sculpts, working with clay; www.allisongrayhurst.com
Consolation Poem By Wislawa Szymborska
Consolation – Poem by Wislawa Szymborska
Darwin.
They say he read novels to relax,
But only certain kinds:
nothing that ended unhappily.
If anything like that turned up,
enraged, he flung the book into the fire.
True or not,
Im ready to believe it.
Scanning in his mind so many times and places,
hed had enough of dying species,
the triumphs of the strong over the weak,
the endless struggles to survive,
all doomed sooner or later.
Hed earned the right to happy endings,
at least in fiction
with its diminutions.
Hence the indispensable
silver lining,
the lovers reunited, the families reconciled,
the doubts dispelled, fidelity rewarded,
fortunes regained, treasures uncovered,
stiff-necked neighbors mending their ways,
good names restored, greed daunted,
old maids married off to worthy parsons,
troublemakers banished to other hemispheres,
forgers of documents tossed down the stairs,
seducers scurrying to the altar,
orphans sheltered, widows comforted,
pride humbled, wounds healed over,
prodigal sons summoned home,
cups of sorrow thrown into the ocean,
hankies drenched with tears of reconciliation,
general merriment and celebration,
and the dog Fido,
gone astray in the first chapter,
turns up barking gladly
in the last.
On Death Without Exaggeration Poem By Wislawa Szymborska
On Death, Without Exaggeration – Poem by Wislawa Szymborska
It can’t take a joke,
find a star, make a bridge.
It knows nothing about weaving, mining, farming,
building ships, or baking cakes.
In our planning for tomorrow,
it has the final word,
which is always beside the point.
It can’t even get the things done
that are part of its trade:
dig a grave,
make a coffin,
clean up after itself.
Preoccupied with killing,
it does the job awkwardly,
without system or skill.
As though each of us were its first kill.
Oh, it has its triumphs,
but look at its countless defeats,
missed blows,
and repeat attempts!
Sometimes it isn’t strong enough
to swat a fly from the air.
Many are the caterpillars
that have outcrawled it.
All those bulbs, pods,
tentacles, fins, tracheae,
nuptial plumage, and winter fur
show that it has fallen behind
with its halfhearted work.
Ill will won’t help
and even our lending a hand with wars and coups d’etat
is so far not enough.
Hearts beat inside eggs.
Babies’ skeletons grow.
Seeds, hard at work, sprout their first tiny pair of leaves
and sometimes even tall trees fall away.
Whoever claims that it’s omnipotent
is himself living proof
that it’s not.
There’s no life
that couldn’t be immortal
if only for a moment.
Death
always arrives by that very moment too late.
In vain it tugs at the knob
of the invisible door.
As far as you’ve come
can’t be undone.