Tag Archives: parents

Sonnet: Shamik Banerjee, ‘To Mr. Banerjee (Senior)’

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Without black tea, his mornings never start.
The newspaper should be upon his bed;
Not finding it will make his eyes all red.
As if examining a piece of art,
He reads each page. Loud oohs such as ‘My heart!’,
‘Another swindle!’, or ‘So many dead!’,
Are heard as if the earth’s weight’s on his head.
Harrumphing, he jumps to the Cultures part.
A pensioner today, back in those days,
He was a banker. Now, he saunters, plays
Carom with me, or spends the noontimes planting
Camellias —- a work he finds enchanting.
At times, he sits before some dusty files,
Puts on the glasses, thumbs through them, and smiles.

*****

First published by Borderless Journal.

Shamik Banerjee is a poet from Assam, India. Some of his recent publications include Spelt, Ink Sweat & Tears, Modern Reformation, San Antonio Review, The Society of Classical Poets, Third Wednesday, and Amethyst Review among others.

Photo: “Bentley Tea Cup” by snap713 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Ekphrastic sonnet: RHL, ‘Ghosts of Dead Parents’

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Her ashes spread on Skirrid that she loved;
and his bones buried by the Harbour bay…
Why choose views for the dead? Once in earth shoved,
dirt in the dark is all they’d see, not day,
even if they lived. And if cremated, well…
So is it for our own guilt’s absolution?
Or status, that their graves our standing tell?
Or rites for social change’s resolution?
Those who were always here are here no more –
Their alwaysness runs out when they decease,
and life will now sound different from before,
like insect shrills not heard until they cease.
Dead ghosts sleep twittering in our heads’ domed caves,
waking to fill night skies from dreams and graves.

*****

This sonnet was published by The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press as a response to their ekphrastic challenge for the illustration, a painting by Žofia Katriňáková. It was written for my parents who, although they died decades ago, are still a background to my thoughts. My father is buried by the bay of Governor’s Harbour, my mother’s ashes were scattered on Skirrid Fawr, the Welsh mountain she loved and lived within sight of in Abergavenny. And I have another short poem for them, published in the Amsterdam Quarterly:

In the night’s jam jar of my memory
my long-dead parents live as fireflies.
My thoughts of them worn by time’s emery,
their faint light still suggests where my path lies.

Is it reasonable to hope to be a firefly for your children and grandchildren?

Using form: John Beaton, ‘Legacy’ (excerpt)

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Inside his penthouse office
he views his Inuit artwork,
carvings from a culture
reduced to buy-and-hold,
then scans the evening city,
his bar chart on the skyline
where real estate has grown his stake
but cost him bonds he’s had to break –
he hadn’t meant to so forsake
his parents. They looked old

that day outside the croft house
when cowed farewells were murmured
as cattle lowed in wind blasts
keening from the sea.
His mother and his father
stood waving from the porch step;
next year she’d crack her pelvic bone,
when winter iced that slab of stone,
and never walk again. I’ll phone,
and he was history.

(…)

He downs his drink and glances
again at his computer –
an email from a neighbour:
Your father died last night.
He’d lately gotten thinner
and seldom had a fire on –
what little peat he had was soft.
Some things of yours are in the loft
so mind them when you sell the croft.
The city lights are bright;

he turns again and faces
his metamorphic sculptures
of walruses in soapstone
that never will break free
from rock that locks the sea waves –
past fused against the future.
Another gin? That’s six. Or eight?
So be it. Clarity’s too late.
His real estate’s no real estate –
he’s left his legacy.

*****

John Beaton writes: “This is a composite. Elements of it are taken from my life but I’ve borrowed significantly from the trajectories of others, especially some of my father’s contemporaries who left Camustianavaig physically but never in their hearts. There are also aspects of the lives of some people I’ve known in business. 

I worked out the form so that each stanza would start out steadily and rhythmically for six trimeter lines then build pace for three rhymed tetrameter lines and rein to a halt with a single trimeter line that has a masculine rhyme with line four. Even though they limit word-choices, I thought feminine endings for the first three lines and lines five and six were worth it for the rhythm. And I like how they form a sort of rhyme and closure gradient with lines four and seven to ten.”

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/

Photo: “‘V for Vendetta’, United States, New York, New York City, West Village, Skyline View” by WanderingtheWorld (www.ChrisFord.com) is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Potcake Poet’s Choice: Tom Vaughan, ‘Happiness’

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It’s easy to forget they’d fought a war:
his father drowned, half-brother bayoneted;
her kilted sibling captured at Dunkirk,
locked up for five long years. But yes they met

in uniform, lost half their friends, before
the normal world re-started when they wed:
mortgage; children; grinding office work –
all I suppose they wanted when they set

out as a couple. We must have been a shock:
busting their rulebook; scornful of sacrifice;
mocking their past and their belief in ‘progress’;

too young, too smashed, too angry to unlock
their silence, or to understand the price
they’d paid for what they’d still call happiness.

Tom Vaughan writes: “I chose Happiness it because I hope it gets right not just my own retrospective feelings about my parents, but also something more general about the generational shift between those who went through WW2 in their youth, and their less-tested offspring.

Secondly, because it’s a sonnet (a favourite form of mine), but in what I call a ‘roller’ rhyming (not always full rhymes) pattern, which tries to pull the reader down to the final line with a lurch which I hope is also of the emotions.

It was published in Dream Catcher in 2016, but has been picked up a couple of times elsewhere since then, including in your Families and Other Fiascoes chapbook.”

Tom Vaughan is not the real name of a poet whose previous publications include a novel and two poetry pamphlets (A Sampler, 2010, and Envoy, 2013, both published by HappenStance). His poems have been published in a range of poetry magazines, including several of the Potcake Chapbooks:
Careers and Other Catastrophes
Familes and Other Fiascoes
Strip Down
Houses and Homes Forever
Travels and Travails.
He currently lives and works in London.
https://tomvaughan.website

Potcake Poet’s Choice: Chris O’Carroll, ‘Postcard from the Afterlife’

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How cool is Heaven? Where do I begin here?
The nightlife’s hipper than pre-war Berlin here,
Yet wholesome as a cozy country inn here.
I’m suave as Cary Grant or Errol Flynn here.
I’ve got broad shoulders and a dazzling grin here,
Plus perfect hair, flat abs and strong, cleft chin here.
(We all look like some sexy film star’s twin here.)
Nobody hates the color of your skin here.
Yang enjoys perfect harmony with yin here.
The food is rich, yet all of us stay thin here.
Nobody has to lose for me to win here.
We’re all on friendly terms with all our kin here.
No politicians practice crooked spin here.
I never get hung over from the gin here.
None of my favorite vices is a sin here.
Damned if I can tell how I got in here.

Chis O’Carroll writes: “I set out to write a matched pair of afterlife poems, assuming that the message from Hell would be inherently funnier.

The Internet’s top bloggers, your ex-lovers,
Share details of how bad you were in bed.
All books, despite the titles on their covers,
Are Dianetics or The Fountainhead.

That sort of stuff. Eternal bliss struck me as less promising comedy material somehow. But my lack of saintliness is pretty hilarious, and one of my many sins is loving monorhyme way more than I should, so the Paradise poem worked out OK after all. I’m often indebted to my wife or to various poet friends as I polish and fine-tune a poem. In this case, it was my late father who read an early draft and helped me punch the thing up. Naturally, this blog is available in Heaven, so he knows I’m giving him a shout-out.“

Chris O’Carroll, author of The Joke’s on Me and Abracadabratude (both from Kelsay Books’ White Violet Press), is a Light magazine featured poet as well as a contributor to the Potcake Chapbooks series (Rogues and Roses, Families and Other Fiascoes, Wordplayful and Murder!) and The Great American Wise Ass Poetry Anthology. His poems appear in An Amaranthine Summer (published in memory of Kim Bridgford), Extreme Sonnets, Love Affairs at the Villa Nelle, and New York City Haiku, among other collections. Chris is a member of Actors Equity and has performed widely as a stand-up comedian. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, historian Karen Manners Smith.

‘Postcard from the Afterlife‘ was originally published in The Spectator.

Potcake Poet’s Choice: Gail White, “Anecdotal Evidence”

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Gail White

Gail White

ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE

My aunt who brought her kidney function back
By eating grapefruit seeds for fifty days
Makes no impression on our local quack.
It’s anecdotal evidence, he says.
There are no reproducible results.
Another person might eat grapefruit seeds
For fifty days and cease to have a pulse.
Cause and effect’s the evidence he needs.
The evidence is all in favor of
The proposition that the dead are dead,
Despite our bitter hope and wistful love.
Yet when my mother died, my father said
That just before the chill that would not thaw,
Her face lit up with joy at what she saw.

Gail White writes: “One poem out of a lifetime’s work is hard to choose, but I find that when I think back over many years of sonnets, my mind keeps settling on this one (first published in Measure). The opening is light (and fictional), but the final sentence on my mother’s death is serious (and true). Perhaps for that reason it has stayed near my heart.”

Gail White is the resident poet and cat lady of Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. Her poems appear in several of the Potcake Chapbooks, available from Sampson Low Publishers; 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.

Poem: “Jam Jar” (was “Fireflies”)

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In the night’s jam jar of my memory
My long-dead parents live as fireflies.
My thoughts of them worn by time’s emery,
Their faint light still suggests where my path lies.


“Jam Jar” was published last year in the September issue of Amsterdam Quarterly (as well as in the AQ 2018 Yearbook). I originally titled it “Fireflies”, but AQ editor Bryan Monte had published a piece with that name in the previous issue, and naturally requested a change. Such are the vagaries of the publishing world.

Catching fireflies in a jar is such a childlike activity. And that’s appropriate here: no matter how old you become, you will always be the child of your parents.

Technically: it’s a short, simple poem. Iambic pentameter suits the meditative mood, the ABAB rhyme scheme is a natural for four lines.