A verysensible story full of very, very, very, very, very good advice
Always carry crumbs when you are wandering in the woods beside the waters – just in case
you need to mark a trail, like in a fairy tale.
And always have a piece of tape in case a butterfly breaks off its wing while fluttering,
and always take a pitchfork just in case a cow is also wandering.
And always carry
extra food
like
roasted beef
or chicken legs
for escaped
crocodiles,
because they like to gnaw on legs,
and always take a mongoose
to defeat the snakes,
and always take a violin
for when
the birds are stuttering.
And always carry
party hats
and birthday cake
for any sons and daughters
of destitute woodcutters
who might be having
lonely
birthdays,
and always carry
an umbrella
because –
you know why.
An elephant might fall out of the sky.
And always take a shovel
just in case
it rains –
so you can dig a little hovel
and stay dry,
and always take a potted plant
to brighten up that cozy space,
and always take a duck
in case
of lakes,
and always
carry otters.
*****
Isabel Chenot writes: “This was originally written and illustrated as a letter to the most magical six year old girl.”
‘What To Take For A Walk In The Woods’ was first published in Story Warren.
Isabel Chenot‘s first poem as a little girl was about marrying her cat Tig when she grew up: she married a good man instead, but kept scribbling poems and stories. The Joseph Tree, a collection of poems, is available from Wiseblood. For a preview of West of Moonlight, East of Dawn, her retelling of an old fairy tale, visit westofmoonlight.art.
Our lost ones drift down a dark stream, surfacing at the brink of dream. The crack of dawn: they’re gone again. What have they left for us to keep? Night’s dialect, a coded speech beyond our reach.
Birds on the bank of a calm pond: each one is still and poised, then dives. Mornings we wake into our lives, blind to what lies beyond, below, the chasms where black rivers flow, and flickering deeper, darkly clear, that coded speech beyond our reach, words we can’t hear.
*****
Rachel Hadas has a group of sonnets appearing, one a week, in The Sonneteer. For the first she wrote: “The sonnets that will be appearing in the coming weeks weren’t conceived as a sequence. Encouraged by Ken Gordon’s enthusiasm to take a look at some of my unpublished shorter poems, I speedily found one fourteen-liner, “Tectonic Plates.” Three other poems were so close to sonnet length that they almost begged to be tweaked or tightened or gently expanded; this group includes “Out of Reach,” “Winter,” and “My Best Friend’s Mother.” In every case, the sonnetification (Ken’s helpful coinage) improved the poem. (…) I now realize that, while not conceived as a sequence, all five of these sonnets (now that they are all sonnets) do share themes. They’re about time and memory, aging and loss, what we lose and what we retain. So are many other sonnets, infinitely greater than mine. It’s a privilege to be able to join in the conversation, to swell the chorus.“
Rachel Hadas (born November 8, 1948) is an American poet, teacher, essayist, and translator. Her most recent essay collection is Piece by Piece: Selected Prose (Paul Dry Books, 2021), and her most recent poetry collection is Ghost Guest (Ragged Sky Press, 2023). Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Ingram Merrill Foundation Grants, the O.B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
So, to be fair: the AI doesn’t care. Drop your intransigence; forget belligerence: the universe just wants intelligence. Be glad amoebas, dinosaurs, don’t take pride of place; they were supplanted by the human race… but we are clearly not the end. Be glad we’ve helped the next in line ascend.
Those who strive may fail; those with no drive may still prevail. So just enjoy the view… let AI keep us as their little zoo.
*****
Happy New Year! May your life be enjoyable as well as interesting, as we move into the ever more rapidly evolving future.
‘When AI Rules’ was first published in Bewildering Stories. Thanks, Don Webb and John Stocks.
Look at all the work the universe has done. It makes the most of ordinary light from new moon to full moon, from sun to setting sun.
It does the work of all the worlds rolled up into one mind-boggling miracle of space and time and light. Look at all the work the universe has done.
Will we ever know for certain how the universe was begun? Will we ever learn the reason for all this lovely light from new moon to full moon, from sun to setting sun?
Much of what we think we see, we know in fact is gone. Stars do die out long before we catch their traveling light. Look at all the work the universe has done.
Now look at all the works of man, the wealth of our creation. There are still no substitutes for heat and light… from new moon to full moon, from sun to setting sun.
I’m ready to quit my day jobs now; to leave them, one by one. All I want is to make the most of ordinary light, to look at all the work the universe has done from new moon to full moon, from sun to setting sun.
***
Peggy Landsman writes: “I had been up all one long winter night with a group of friends in Buffalo, NY, in the mid-1970s. At one point, sitting around the kitchen table, I suddenly noticed daylight coming through the window. I had a moment of epiphany and blurted out: “Look at all the work the universe has just done!” After I went home and got some sleep, I started the work of writing the poem.”
“Light Villanelle” was first published in a now defunct online journal, Bringing Sonnets Back.
Peggy Landsman is the author of the full-length poetry collection, Too Much World, Not Enough Chocolate (Nightingale & Sparrow Press, 2024), and two poetry chapbooks: Our Words, Our Worlds (Kelsay Books, 2021) and To-wit To-woo (Foothills Publishing, 2008). She lives in South Florida within a short drive of a good library and a beautiful beach. A selection of her online publications is available on her website: peggylandsman.wordpress.com
At night we dream to clean our memory, discard trash from our cache. Reincarnating after death would be the same; the past, scraped by death’s emery, unknown in the new game, cleansed of our memories, but with a stash of added skills… and karma’s unpaid bills.
*****
No, I don’t believe in reincarnation. I don’t believe in anything, or in nothing; I’m an absolute agnostic. “I think therefore I am” is as far as you can go with any certainty – even “who or what I am” is ultimately unknown.
‘Clearing the Cache’ was published in Bewildering Stories. Thanks, Don Webb (if you exist, of course…)
To be loved by you is like floating on my back, falling asleep in the sea’s slack. Sometimes. Sometimes it is more unnerving, leaping with a wave for bodysurfing, being swept facedown up the beach, hair and ears full of sand. That too is love, and grand. Sometimes, again, I hope for more that’s out of reach – (and you do too – don’t glower!) and sometimes we get gifts hard to believe, dolphins swimming with us half an hour till mutually we and they just turn away, they to sea and we to shore, and then they come back suddenly once more and leap, so close, and leap, and leap again… and leave.
All those are in “loved by” – the calm; the turbulent rift, the sparkling fizz, the sudden unexpected gift. What can I say? I couldn’t, wouldn’t, choose to deny how sweet it is.
*****
Thirty-five years with Eliza and still going strong. Who knew.
‘How Sweet It Is’ was published in the current Snakeskin.
I feel a kinship with those, never met, who live, uncertain and displaced in the wrong place on planet earth and sea: with different languages at home and school, without a passport from the place they’re raised, their natural faith despoiled by pointless war, their sex uncertain, orphaned from themselves, poets of restlessness, pilots adrift, obscure, uncertain in their rootlessness, chameleons of constant camouflage, and all the little that they know deep down forever hidden from some foreign frown.
*****
My sense of being displaced is largely one of nationality: in every country I’ve lived in, I feel the closest connection to other expats; and there is no country in which I don’t feel like an expat myself. But that also gives me a sense of commonality with all others in all forms of insecurity and displacement. And maybe it is a natural part of being human… after all, all adults have been displaced from the very different world of childhood.
Clip clop clip clop steady up yon stuntgrass rise, boy, long as low and stony-brown, slow like weeks with nothing in them: saddle-tick, dirt-crump, poker-face.
Clip clop clip clop privy-top and anchor-wires, church-cross, store-spike, steady boy, up yon one-street, just more-trodden dust: saddle-tick, dirt-crump, poker-face.
Clip clop clip clop steady, boy, through sad wood civics, rippled in yon saloon-glass store-side, road-end, horses maybe leaving: saddle-tick, dirt-crump, poker-face.
Clip clop clip clop rise, boy, steady, way ahead, purple-white mountains, nothing in them maybe, like weeks maybe: saddle-tick, dirt-crump, poker-face.
2.
My brother’s name was Crazy Sean. They shot him in the head. He rattled through the summer corn and turned the green shucks red.
I laid him in the willowbrake. I couldn’t stand to pray. I kissed his cheek for pity’s sake, and then I rode away.
The plains are full of buffalo. The woods are red and gold. The mountaintops are white with snow. His memory keeps me cold.
I’ve rode through Hope and Whisky Creek. I’ve rode through Faith and Love. I’ve laid in Hate and Hide-and-Seek, and run from God-Above.
The prairie shines, the buckdeer cry. The hawks hang in the heat. Clipclop clipclop, the world rolls by. They say revenge is sweet.
3.
Somewhere still, stark as an afternoon; Ached in long planks of sunshine; Like a gambler’s card dropped on an empty land; Vauntsquare, the nailed-up main street creaks Against the air. Clipclop – hotel, laundry, saddles, Telegraph, clap-houses, guns. The horse stops. Into this hollow spine of fellowship blows a slow O of wind. Three men clatter at a boardwalk: Nacarat boots, sharktooth mojos – oh my brother.
4.
I shot one on the shithouse board. His head smashed like a squash and sprayed the backboards red. He pissed his boots and died. The stinking hole spit up a fat, black fly, which was his soul. I shot one in the barbershop. The chair caught fire, and ate his o-colonied hair. He fell out like a slice of spitroast meat. The duster wrapped him in its winding-sheet. I shot one in the cornfield. Larks of blood flew off his skull and twittered in the mud. He rattled through the stalks. His mashy head threw up its brain and turned the green shucks red. I took a bath and threw away my gun. I rode away wherever. I was done.
5.
drizzle pops on his hatbrim, cord and wool and steam-sodden, saddleticks like an empty stomach.
windpump wires and tin-dump, like horizon-drowning, horse, then man, hat, gone, clipclop, dusk drips in.
paraffin lamplight pricks the town, glo-worms, night hunched above, coyotes carry their eyes like stars.
6.
reckoning done how will he ever be warm
purpose gone how will he outrun the storm
bearings none how will he find another
riding alone how will he tell his brother
*****
John Gallas writes: “‘Western Man’ is a weird one: I have a quite spooky love of Westerns, jogging as they do some very deep links with Old En Zed, remnants (many remnants!) of which I grew up with and in. Those old wooden towns, the dim General Stores, the slightly grim and mostly silent (mostly) men, the cheek-by-jowlness of town and bush. It means quite a lot to me. I find the end of most Clint Eastwood films, and especially ‘Once Upon A Time in the West’, as the hero says ‘I gotta go now’, and rides away into lonliness after some bloody vengeance or other, inexpressibly moving.”
John Gallas, Aotearoa/NZ poet, published mostly by Carcanet. Saxonship Poet (see http://www.saxonship.org), Fellow of the English Association, St Magnus Festival Orkney Poet, librettist, translator and biker. Presently living in Markfield, Leicestershire. Website is www.johngallaspoetry.co.uk which has a featured Poem of the Month, complete book list, links and news.
The Universe is made of false analogies – flawed observations, secondhand “I see”s, discarded dreams. Nothing is truly as it seems. We build our intellectual shelter from life’s gales from scraps of lumber and found nails, anything within reach, rope washed up on a beach, a sliding glass door, still intact, used as a wall. And all because the Universe we sense has flaws, disobeys its own laws, is just a framework for the Mind That Plays, a sketch, hypothesis; a tract, not fact; a work in process, changing with the days. Dig deeper, and find fresh discrepancies. Our shelter, in fair weather, keeps us warm, can stand up to a breeze… will be no shelter in the coming storm.
*****
I marvel at the impossibilities of the quantum mechanisms of the universe being revealed. I enjoy Nick Bostrom’s speculations on everything being a simulation. I wonder at the powerful who are jockeying for development and control of AI, at our Nietzschean will to power, at our eternal quest for immortality. I am aware that nature constantly sacrifices billions in the process of advancing a few. I wonder if we are in that process now. I am not bothered that I have no answers.
This poem was first published in the current edition of Pulsebeat. Thanks, David Stephenson!
So far the nights feel lonelier than the days. In light, the living keep me company, and memories of voices through the years.
Each summer threads a green familiar maze. Emerging sun-struck, you can barely spy the slow kaleidoscope of clouds and hours.
Those flannel nightshirts chilly sleepers wear as summer wanes: I’m giving them away. Pass it on: you keep at the same time.
A bough has broken from the Duchess tree. Rain swelled the apples. Too much lightness weighs heavy: the heft of the idea of home tempered with the detachment of a dream, or tidal pulls, like ocean, like moonrise.
*****
Rachel Hadas writes: “Summer Nights and Days, from perhaps 2009-2011, is one of a number of pieces written in and about Vermont which I recently tightened into short prose texts and collected in my latest book, Pastorals (2025); as it appears here, it’s still in its poem format. This piece may or may not have been written after my late husband’s death in 2011, but is certainly refers to a time when I was essentially living alone. My son and his visiting friends were the recipients of old nightshirts (more recycling).”
Rachel Hadas’s recent books include Love and Dread, Pandemic Almanac, and Ghost Guest. Her translations include Euripides’s Iphigenia plays and a portion of Nonnus’s Tales of Dionysus. Professor Emerita at Rutgers-Newark, where she taught for many years, she now teaches at 92Y in New York City and serves as poetry editor of Classical Outlook. Her honors include a Guggenheim fellowship and an award from the American Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters.
Form in Formless Times 