Category Archives: Poetry

Using form: Rondeau: Gail White, ‘Opera Rondeau’

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And then she dies—since men are no damn good—
Mimi, consumptive and misunderstood,
or Desdemona, most defamed of brides—
the woman is abandoned on all sides—
she so believes in love (as women should)
and in the end she burns like firewood.

Here Tosca on the tower a moment stands,
first throwing back her hood and then her hands
and then one step—invisibly she flies—
and then she dies.

Poor Butterfly, who meant to be so good.
Tough Carmen, using all the wiles she could
to get her man. So many suicides,
so many murders. Violetta hides
but can’t escape—she’s found, she’s understood—
and then she dies.

*****

Gail White writes: “One of my favorites in my new book Paper Cuts is ‘Opera Rondeau’.  It was written after a friend pointed out to me that most summaries of opera plots could end with the words “then she dies.” Although the poem doesn’t conform perfectly to the rondeau rhyme scheme, it does provide the perfect refrain. And gives me a chance to mention a few of the many opera heroines who win, lose, or miss love altogether – and die.”

Gail White is the resident poet and cat lady of Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. Her books ASPERITY STREET and CATECHISM are available on Amazon. She is a contributing editor to Light Poetry Magazine. “Tourist in India” won the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award for 2013. Her poems have appeared in the Potcake Chapbooks ‘Tourists and Cannibals’, ‘Rogues and Roses’, ‘Families and Other Fiascoes’, ‘Strip Down’ and ‘Lost Love’. ‘Opera Rondeau’ was first published in Mezzo Cammin and is collected in her new light verse chapbook, ‘Paper Cuts‘, also available on Amazon.

Photo: “Heroine – a female lament” by Yo! Opera is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Non-traditional sonnet: Marcus Bales, ‘The Durable Rain’

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The durable rain was conducting its drumming descent
Without any decent regard for the dawning of day
As if a dim evening was all of the morning it meant
To allow from a sun that was doing a landscape in grey.
Never begin with the weather the boffins have said.
If nature’s as stormy and dark as a novelist’s mind
The reader will sneer at the metaphor. Offer instead
A prose that’s so difficult readers are left far behind.
But back to my tale. Is it cozy inside, or does rain
Express what discursive description would talk past in vain?
Does a cry break a heart when the kettle releases its steam
Or, piping, awaken a lover up out of their dream?
What it will mean will depend on your context and age.
A poem exists in the reader and not on the page.

*****

Marcus Bales writes: “The first four lines rolled out without much trouble. I had let the dogs out after they’d woken me at what they thought was the right time but which to me was five in the a.m. It was cold and grey but not rainy at all. Who can figure how the brain works. I did worry briefly about the alliteration but finally put it off, hoping it would sound like rain on the roof. Sort of. And it seemed portentous and poetry-like, but where to go from that?

“I don’t know where I first heard that you’re not supposed to open with the weather. It sounds like one of those pieces of advice the internet kicks up from time to time purportedly by Elmore Leonard, along the lines of “You know those parts that readers skip over? Don’t write those.” Or “You got to know when to hold ‘em and know when to fold ‘em.” Advice that is absolutely both spot-on and worthless at one and the same time. If you know you don’t need any advice; if you need advice, it’s because you don’t know. It makes sense in that maddening way of all advice, but it is untakeable. However much you may agree that the reader doesn’t care what the weather is, they care what happens and who it happens to, there I still was without anyone there to have something happen to, except the damn rain.

“Sitting at breakfast reading my usual dollop of Wodehouse, I noticed that when things are going well for his characters the weather gets some generous play, and when not, not. Then I reflected that really I don’t have a large supply of written descriptions of the weather from anywhere. There’s ‘Neutral Tones’, of course, where the weather is a metaphor for the breaking relationship, and “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” And ‘Stopping By Woods’ where the weather is the reason for the stopping, or the first lines of ‘Journey of the Magi’. There’s Auden’s ‘In Memory of Yeats’, Housman’s cherries hung like snow, if that even works, though who Snow was and how Housman knew is a mystery. And after that it’s vague references to this or that month or season generally in Keats, Poe, Byron, or Shelley, and the inference that all of Yeats happens in the summer what with swans and people fighting the horses of the sea, and all. And finally, again, all those descriptions of the morning in the Blandings and the golf stories. After that my memory starts to flail about. This isn’t the sort of thing where research is indicated at five in the ack emma. Perhaps you remember more examples of how the weather is used in prose and poetry, but it’s too late now, isn’t it.

“I wasn’t sure how to go on. It seemed as if nearly the whole practice of poetry in English was against me, aside from the sub-genre of song with all those deep and crisp and evens, and sleigh rides that began to echo in the back of my head, along with all those singers who seem to be perpetually crying or dancing or walking in the rain. Then I thought well, why not use that? I might get three or four lines out of it, and then maybe something else would occur to me. Well, I got my four lines and arrived at the volta of the sonnet, if sonnet it turned out to be. What now?

“Turning at the question that had stopped me I trod upon that patch for a few lines, and then I had got to the couplet. Well, I really had nothing, did I, among all this meta- bit, and what I had seemed to call for some digging into the whats and whys of how literature worked. Well, of course no one knows. I worried some about having failed to provide any context for the reader to see me through, and put it aside to eat breakfast.

“After that, and a shower, and a bit of humor watching the dogs return to the scene of the five o’clock crime outside to chase a squirrel in the yard, somehow the notion of context reasserted itself, and I remembered a sort of juicy quote from a professor 50 years ago who was gassing on about how a poem isn’t the sounds or the words or the meanings as the poet meant them, but rather the unpredicatable ways that the people misread poems. I recall he had half a dozen examples right to hand, as scholars so annoyingly seem to do, but I couldn’t bring a single one to mind. Fortunately, I’m a poet, not a scholar, so I don’t have to be able to give good – or any – examples, so I decided to steal his assertion and let it go at that.

“And there it is. A complete mishmash of false starts, interrupted middles, and squishy endings. Enjoy!”

Not much is known about Marcus Bales except that he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, and that his work has not been published in Poetry or The New Yorker. However his ‘51 Poems‘ is available from Amazon. He has been published in several of the Potcake Chapbooks (‘Form in Formless Times’).

Photo: “Rainy Day” by SammCox is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Joe Crocker, ‘What Sunflowers See’

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They lift and fix their heavy insect eyes
upon the East, from where the sun will send
the bees to stroke and lick and fertilize.
 
They wait, where once they craned their necks to see
his passing arc. They wait, amazed. Surprise
has painted yellow lashes, perfectly
 
coronal round a crowded, dark eclipse.
Its buzzing beauty pixelates and stares.
An alien array of cells unzips.
 
A thousand thousand sisters nurse the same
regret. His warmth is gone. And left behind
to hang their heads, disconsolate, they blame
themselves. Their tears drop hard and black and blind

*****

Joe Crocker writes: “The French call them Tournesols because, when they are growing, the follow the sun. But when the flowerhead is fully formed, they all face East so they warm up quickly and are more attractive to the bees. The poem came about because I’ve been seeing them more frequently in our local supermarkets and my wife grew some this year. Seeing them close up, I was reminded of the reaction a friend from many years ago used to have. She liked them but kept her distance because she was spooked by their dense busy centres. So the insect eye was the starting metaphor and then the poem led me on. Big, beautiful, disturbing, and in the end, sad.”

Joe Crocker is no relation of the Sheffield-born rock singer. But he does live in Yorkshire and gets by (with a little help from his friends). He is a bit old now to be starting out in poetry but was infected by the muse during Covid lockdown a couple of years ago and has had a few things published, mainly in Snakeskin magazine (where this poem first appeared) and other online venues. He doesn’t have a website but if you Google him, you’ll learn a lot more about a certain Sheffield-born rock singer.

Photo: accompanied the poem in Snakeskin.

Using form: biform poem: Daniel Galef, ‘A Poke of Gold to the Lady That’s Known as Lou’

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I saw the sigh in your pretty eye
    When you dreamed that I’d be yours,
But those who steal me fast reveal
    My shine is the start of wars.

First I passed through the purse of a miner who nursed
    A chill. He seemed to be
Just a helping of hurt in a flannelette shirt
    From Plumtree, Tennessee.

It’s the goal of gold to be bought and sold
    And melted and poured in a mould.
From the day they scratched me out of that patch
    Of dirt, I’ve been near as cold.

Now again I change hands, and again the sands
    Run out, and men lie dead.
Good chances, I’d rate, that the heftier weight
    Is a couple of rounds of lead.

I’ve been sought by those men—half a dozen or ten—
    Who flash gold in pokes and pounds,
Who begged you for dances and killed for your glances—
    It’s not as nice as it sounds.

I saw the sigh in your pretty eye when you dreamed
That I’d be yours, but those who steal me fast
Reveal in my shine is the start of wars. First I passed
Through the purse of a miner who nursed a chill. He seemed
To be just a helping of hurt in a flannelette shirt
From Plumtree, Tennessee. It’s the goal of gold
To be bought and sold and melted and poured in a mould.
From the day they scratched me out of that patch of dirt,
I’ve been near as cold. Now again I change hands, and again
The sands run out, and men lie dead. Good chances,
I’d rate, that the heftier weight is a couple of rounds
Of lead. I’ve been sought by those men—half a dozen or ten—
Who flash gold in pokes and pounds, who begged you for dances
And killed for your glances—It’s not as nice as it sounds.

*****

Daniel Galef writes: “Last month Robin posted ‘Casey to His Bat,’ a poem which scans as both a sonnet and as fourteeners in ballad meter. The intro mentioned that I’d written a few more of this type of poem after ‘Casey,’ one of which was titled ‘A Poke of Gold to the Lady That’s Known as Lou.’
As much as I loved the challenge of writing the Casey sonnet, I felt the form had to be justified somehow by the subject, and so, just as ‘Casey’ followed Ernest Thayer* in its alternate scheme of iambic heptameter couplets, each of the subsequent convertible sonnets, part of my Imaginary Sonnets series of persona poems, is also a response to or parody of a specific existing poem in a different meter which the sonnet doubles.
The second convertible sonnet, ‘A Poke of Gold to the Lady That’s Known as Lou’, is a riff on the famous narrative poems of Robert Service ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’ and ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’ in his 1907 collection Songs of a Sourdough. (Like Thayer, Service is sometimes scorned as a jingle-writer partly because of his popularity and his populism, writing in the vernacular voice of Yukon prospectors.) Both of these narrative poems are written in a much looser anapestic ballad meter with more inversions and extra syllables than sonnets normally allow. While ‘McGrew’ has the basic ballad rhyme scheme, scanning as heptameter couplets like ‘Casey,’ ‘McGee’ has a much denser scheme, adding on top of these end-rhymes a pattern of dimeter internal rhyme. I loved the much greater challenge of compounding this rhyme scheme with that of a Petrarchan sonnet, but, due to the anapests, the finished product feels less like a sonnet than ‘Casey ‘did.
This poem appeared in Snakeskin Poetry in 2017, and, although it is not included in my book Imaginary Sonnets published this year, you will find, in the poems there, these same immortal threads: gold (p. 41), murder (p. 71), poetic parody (p. 72), and Canada (p. 19). danielgalef.com/book/
*Thayer’s poem, possibly the last American poem to have massive popular appeal to the extent that it was commonly memorized for fun and performed on the vaudeville stage, was published in 1888, the same year as the florid Victorian sonneteer Eugene Lee-Hamilton published Imaginary Sonnets, which inspired my book.”

*****

Daniel Galef’s first book, Imaginary Sonnets, is a collection of persona poems all from the point of view of different historical figures and objects, including Nossis the Epizephyrian, Christopher Smart’s cat, and a breakfast taco. Besides poetry, he has written plays that won the McGill University Drama Festival, flash fiction selected for the Best Small Fictions anthology, and last year he placed second in the New Yorker cartoon caption contest, which doesn’t really mean anything but he’s been telling everyone anyway.

Using form: John Beaton, ‘Stillbirth’

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I.

The day I left for Canada my mother
and father quelled their tears. We held and hugged.
He said, “We three may never see each other
alive again.” That leaving
hooked my gut and tugged.

We never did. He died and left her widowed
so next time we three met was at his tomb.
Our parting afterwards had been foreshadowed–
the breakage of the cord
that fed me from her womb.

We rode on gondolas to summits she
had never dreamed of. Mountains could not buy
her heart from where they’d raised the family–
we shared reunions linked
by contrails in the sky.

II.

Hi, Mum. It’s me, from Canada, your John.
Och, John! You’ve caught me in an awful state!
I know. I’m sad to hear that Henry’s gone.
The one that was my brother?
My memory’s not great.

He’s back now, from the War. Oh dear, they’re here.
Who? They’re all against me. Who? The clique.
They’ve done such nasty things. They think I’m queer.
I think I’ll kill myself.
So how’s the house this week?

Och this one’s grand. I moved two days ago.
And Johnny helped. I think he’s at the door.
I’ll have to run now, Henry. Cheerio.
Don’t go. The phone is dead.
The cord exists no more.

III.

A winter storm comes sweeping down the hills
and, gusting, blasts umbrellas inside-out.
They ring the grave like blighted daffodils
and rain-black mourners hold,
like buffeted peat-burn trout.

I take the tasselled pall rope, let it slide,
and with my brothers ease the coffin down;
it slips across the lip of a great divide
and sinks what was my mother–
a shuck, a wrinkled gown.

Gales carry off the prayer as it is spoken.
I cast the rope adrift. The rains of Skye
slap my back. Again, a cord has broken–
this time my lungs won’t fill.
I try but cannot cry.

*****

John Beaton writes: ” This one is autobiographical. Using the metaphor of an umbilical cord, it tells how emigration stretches and breaks family connections. The title refers to the old practice alluded to in the last stanza of holding the newborn upside down and slapping it on the back till a cry indicates its lungs have started to work and it is breathing on its own. At the end of the poem, grief prevents such a cry. 
The dementia dialog is taken pretty much verbatim from an international phone call to my mother. That’s the part that crystallized the abacb rhyme scheme and 55533 meter. The dialog fell into place with that pattern and I felt it worked for the rest of the poem too. I think the last two lines of each stanza, with the first being unrhymed and the second linking through masculine rhyme with line two, act like an alexandrine and combine to give a closure effect.
The three-part structure represents three stages of escalating disconnection.”

John Beaton’s metrical poetry has been widely published and has won numerous awards. He recites from memory as a spoken word performer and is author of Leaving Camustianavaig published by Word Galaxy Press, which includes this poem. Raised in the Scottish Highlands, John lives in Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island.
https://www.john-beaton.com/

“Cill Chriosd Graveyard Isle of Skye Scotland” by Tour Scotland Photographs is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Using form: biform poem: Daniel Galef, ‘Casey to his Bat’

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(as a sonnet after Eugene Lee-Hamilton’s 1888 collection “Imaginary Sonnets”)

You’re swell! No wizard’s-wand or Rod of Aaron
With this ease can whack one past the glove
The way a sparrow weaves through trees. No baron
Wields your power—you’re the scepter of
A king, and blood descendent of the club
That Hercules did swing. That bat was blessed!
It knocked the blocks off lions. (Not a cub—
A full-grown beast.) Herc wore its skin, the rest
Cooked up for grub. My point: We’ll stand immobile.
It’s beneath us—just a dud. To swing
At these poor lulus would insult your noble
Blood. One pitch will come—the air will sing—
We’ll know that this is it. We’ll swing. We’ll hit!
The crowd will cheer! We’ll run! We’ll win!—Oh, shit.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

(in the meter of Ernest Thayer’s 1888 poem “Casey at the Bat”)

You’re swell! No wizard’s-wand or Rod of Aaron with this ease
Can whack one past the glove the way a sparrow weaves through trees.
No baron wields your power—you’re the scepter of a king,
And blood descendent of the club that Hercules did swing.
That bat was blessed! It knocked the blocks off lions. (Not a cub—
A full-grown beast.) Herc wore its skin, the rest cooked up for grub.
My point: We’ll stand immobile. It’s beneath us—just a dud.
To swing at these poor lulus would insult your noble blood.
One pitch will come—the air will sing—we’ll know that this is it.
We’ll swing. We’ll hit! The crowd will cheer! We’ll run! We’ll win!—Oh, shit.

*****

Daniel Galef writes: “I wrote this poem in 2017 while I was a student at McGill University and looking for anything to work on except my work. I have always loved both math and language, as well as making them kiss like two Barbies you mash together, and “Casey” was inspired by a couple of happy arithmetical coincidences: First, that there are exactly 70 metrical feet (or 25.52 imperial metres) in either one sonnet or 20 lines of ballad meter. Second, that both Ernest Thayer’s famous ballad “Casey at the Bat” and Eugene Lee-Hamilton’s not-so-famous collection Imaginary Sonnets were published in 1888.
The speaker of “Casey” is the mighty mock-hero of Ernest Thayer’s poem, subtitled a “Ballad of the Republic,” which is composed of standard ballad meter: rhyming couplets in iambic heptameter or alternating lines of tetrameter and trimeter. Thayer’s was possibly the last American poem to have massive popular appeal to the extent that it was commonly memorized for fun, performed on the vaudeville stage, and adapted into multiple films and even Disney cartoons. I memorized it in college as a party trick, which I’m quite eager to try out if I ever get invited to any parties.
As far as I know, this is the first sonnet* of its kind. I wrote another after, which was published first. Now that my first book is out,** I’ve written a third and fourth, but am still in the process of trying to find them loving homes in some journal or website where they can frolic and play with the other little sonnets. Of course, nothing’s wholly original. When I was a child I read a short poem by Mary Youngquist in a Willard Espy book which was readable as eight lines of six syllables or six lines of eight syllables. Robin informed me when the second of these was first printed (“A Poke of Gold” in Snakeskin Poetry in 2019; “Casey” was published in Able Muse in 2020) that the French surrealist Louis Aragon was toying with similar four-six/six-four patterns in the 1940s. But I think these are the first sonnets!
If you liked these, by all means check out my book, Imaginary Sonnets, available wherever sonnets are sold—but try here first: danielgalef.com/book/

*Sometimes they’re sonnets! I don’t really know what to call these. “Convertible sonnets” makes it sound like the rain will get in if you leave the top down, and “transforming sonnets” are plastic toys that come with a kid’s meal. The inaugural issue of the Journal of Wordplay called it an “equivocal sonnet,” and linked it to the 19th century genre “equivoque.” If you alternate the letters of sonnet and ballad, you get “sboanlnleatd.”*** Or, if you change the lineation of the poem only on a full moon: “were-sonnets”?
**Imaginary Sonnets (Able Muse Press, 2023), inspired by the Lee-Hamilton book—70 persona poems all from the point of view of different historical figures, literary characters, and inanimate objects, including Lucrezia Borgia, Wernher von Braun, and a new brand of breakfast taco.
***Both “sonnet” and “ballad” come from the Old Occitan troubadours; “sonnet” is a diminutive of “song” whereas “ballad,” a cognate with “ballet,” comes from “dance.”

*****

Daniel Galef’s first book, Imaginary Sonnets, is a collection of persona poems all from the point of view of different historical figures and objects, including Nossis the Epizephyrian, Christopher Smart’s cat, and a breakfast taco. Besides poetry, he has written plays that won the McGill University Drama Festival, flash fiction selected for the Best Small Fictions anthology, and last year he placed second in the New Yorker cartoon caption contest, which doesn’t really mean anything but he’s been telling everyone anyway.

Photo: “Casey At The Bat at Games On The Boardwalk” by Castles, Capes & Clones is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

Using form: irregular sonnet: Jane Blanchard, ‘Premises’

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After an argument I listen hard
to noises in our common house—the ticking
of clocks, the humming of fans, the creaking of floors,
the rumbling of pipes, the ringing of phones, the groaning
of springs, the clacking or clinking of keys, the droning
of television, the drumming of laundry, the clicking
of locks, the tumbling of ice, the squeaking of doors—
all louder once a morning has been marred.
Hours may pass as I interpret sound
by sound—source, frequency, duration. Some
attention goes to silences, which pound
and pound, but not to show where each comes from.
Throughout, peace can be found in knowing you
are also wondering when words are due.

*****

Jane Blanchard writes: “This sonnet from Metes and Bounds was first published in Mezzo Cammin (Summer 2017). It is rather irregular, especially in the octave, but such deviation seems appropriate for the subject, at least to me. This poem is largely a list, yet it has narrative and lyrical elements, too, and the experience described, I hope, is easily perceived.”

A native Virginian, Jane Blanchard lives and writes in Georgia. Her latest collection with Kelsay Books is Metes and Bounds (2023).

Photo: detail of the cover of Metes and Bounds.

Using form: Accentual Metre: Susan McLean, ‘Stone’

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Offered bread,
I asked for a stone.
The stone was good,
but I ate alone.

I took my bows
in a hail of rocks,
and built my house
of stumbling blocks.

But its walls are aligned
so true and tight
that they keep out the wind
that blows all night.

*****

Susan McLean writes: “And when the tempter came to him, he said, If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread.” Matthew 4:3 (King James Version)
“Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone?” Matthew 7:9 (King James Version)
“I am not a religious believer, nor have I been one for many decades. But the poetry of the Old Testament and the metaphorical language of the New Testament both left their mark on me. Paradoxes and counterintuitive arguments, so integral to parables, are also at the core of poetry. Bread and stones—what does it mean to refuse the former in favor of the latter? To reject the normal and necessary, while choosing the impossible and unsustaining, can only lead to being misunderstood and rejected oneself, possibly even persecuted. Yet in this poem I argue that, paradoxically, taking the hard and lonely path has its own rewards. A stumbling block is solid; with a sufficient number of them, one can build a shelter that can withstand the strongest winds.
“The slant rhymes in lines 1 and 3 of each stanza, with their hint of dissonance, meet the resolution of the true rhymes in lines 2 and 4. Because dimeter lines, with just two stresses per line, can quickly become monotonous if the lines are too regular, I chose to use accentual meter instead of the more predictable accentual-syllabic meter. Therefore, the number of syllables per line varies from a low of three to a high of six. “This poem, originally published in the online journal The Chimaera, later appeared in my second poetry book, The Whetstone Misses the Knife.”

Susan McLean has two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
https://www.pw.org/content/susan_mclean

Photo: “Beautiful circular window and rough stone wall on this quaint little former school house in Arklow from the 1800s #windows #arklow #irisharchitecture” by irishhomemagazine is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Using form: Sonnet within Sonnet: Daniel Kemper, ‘Her Petrarchan Heart’

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a Petrarchan sonnet embedded inside an Elizabethan sonnet

I smile in my Italian heart—but English ways,
against emotions so taboo, require some tact
and so I’m hiding in plain view. My eye still strays.
My nerves are tinder. But the part below this act,
which kindles want, slips through the art I layer on
and now that art is burning too. It’s civil war:
I smother it, but when I do, though flames seem gone,
the smolderings rebel, restart, and billow more.
And yet I’ve learned to love this dance and my disguise
far more than I let on I do. I bait and stare.
I turn demure. It draws you in, intensifies,
and stops. I am not queen by chance. I hold you there:
But if I let you go will you pull through your doubt,
let my Elizabeth stay in…and Petrarch out?

*****

Daniel Kemper writes: “Her Petrarchan Heart is a sonnet within a sonnet, tetrameter within hexameter, to illustrate the real personage inside the speaker.”

Editor’s note: You can indeed read down the poem, line by line, skipping the last four syllables in each line:
I smile in my Italian heart
against emotions so taboo…
you will find the rhythm and rhymes easily enough to guide you, and it is a complete poem in itself, the heart sonnet (Petrarchan, rhyming ABBA ABBA CDE CDE) within the speaker sonnet (Shakespearean, rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF GG).

The poem(s) first appeared in The Society of Classical Poets.

Daniel Kemper is a systems engineer living in California. He writes that his “poetry rebels against the constraints of form, not by destroying it and discarding it, but by turning the tables” in his approach. Only recently emerging into the poetry scene Kemper has already been accepted for publication at thehypertexts.com, The Creativity Webzine, Amethyst Review, Rat’s Ass Review, and Ekphrastic Review. He earned a BA from NC State, and an MBA from University of Phoenix, is currently enrolled in an MA program in Creative Writing at Cal State U, Sacramento, and is working towards being certified to teach community college.

Illustration: “Marie Spartali Stillman – Love’s Messenger [1885]” by Gandalf’s Gallery is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Brian Gavin, ‘Death Watch at the Nursing Home’

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Two rows of heads puffed white for show
are turned to watch the gurney go
parade-like down the hall and through
the double doors, and out of view.

They linger, as the swinging doors
are gazed to stillness, and intercourse
is but the mingling of silhouettes.
Beyond the tumults of regret

and wonder, they are elsewhere, all
their architecture of recall
connecting lives to family plots,
or maybe – further back – in what

may be a keepsake memory – light
parade, perhaps – a child’s delight
in clowns and cotton candy, high
and wispy as puffed hair. Friends die

often, but not in violence –
not here, where death comes to the sense
in not-quite-joy, and not-quite-grief,
but trembling, lightly, like a leaf

that might be blown, or not, or light
as dandelion fields puffed white
and wispy, wavering. In slow surmise
they gaze on quiet with quiet eyes,

filling the hall with noiselessness,
and dreaming but to acquiesce
to dream, and but to linger some
in thrall to stillness yet to come.

*****

Brian Gavin writes: “My poem sort of rips off (shamelessly!) the form and rhyme scheme of the famous A E Housman poem ‘To An Athlete Dying Young‘. It is, however, about a different kind of death – extreme old age – and the gentleness of it. It’s based on something I actually saw in a nursing home, when white heads once leaned out of their rooms to see a friend taken away on a gurney. The image of a parade struck me, and the heads of puffed white hair reminded me of cotton candy at the parades of my youth. Eventually the images of puffed hair and puffed candy morphed into a field of puffed white dandelions wavering in the wind.
I almost left the title at ‘Death Watch‘ – which I kind of preferred for the double meaning – but opted to add the rest of it for the sake of clarity. This piece ran in my collection Burial Grounds.”

Brian Gavin is a retired Distribution Manager who started writing poetry 10 years ago. His poems have appeared in The Journal of Formal Poetry, Peninsula Poets and Snakeskin Magazine, and in the Potcake Chapbook ‘Careers and Other Catastrophes’. He lives in Lakeport, Michigan, USA, with his wife Karen. ‘Burial Grounds’ is available from Kelsay Books.
You can see more of his work at briangavinpoetry.com

Photo: “Dandelions Gone to seed, Dandelion puff ball seeds weeds lawn infestation roundup herbicide Pics by Mike Mozart of TheToyChannel and JeepersMedia on YouTube #Dandelions #Weeds #DandelionSeeds #Lawn #DandelionFlowers #Dandelion” by JeepersMedia is licensed under CC BY 2.0.