Art Treasures / Garn Lake by Byron Beynon

Art Treasures  

Into the secret silence of Manod 

quarry they deposited like Hamelin's children 

  

the National's collection of air-conditioned art, 

safeguarded for posterity inside a Welsh cavern 

  

to escape for five years 

the blitz of a city's acid heart. 

  

Impressionism in central Gwynedd, 

Rembrandt next to Ffestiniog's slate, 

  

sculpted to remember, not to be erased, 

the palettes of durable colour, 

  

an exact style entering the darkness 

brightening a craggy mouth in Wales. 

  

  

*During the Second World War paintings from the National Gallery, Londonwere stored in a quarry in Wales for safe keeping until the war was over.

  

  

Garn Lake

  

She is part of the scenery, 

a human face 

that allows the medicine of nature 

to heal mortal pain. 

The experienced mountains 

observe her stillness 

as wildflowers grow 

near her feet. 

The lake’s sheen 

nurtured by time, 

engages the shore, 

recalls a world 

before wounds and pollution 

as the motion of the day's 

illumination renews 

a depth of captured rhythms. 

 

Byron Beynon's work has appeared in Poetry Wales, The London Magazine, The Yellow Nib, The Honest Ulsterman, Worcester Review and the anthology Winter in America (Again) (Carbonation Press). His most recent collection is Where Shadows Stir (The Seventh Quarry Press).

A Paris Exhibition / House at Dusk by Jan Darrow

A Paris Exhibition

I planted flowers today
in my garden.
Nymphaea
from Monet’s Water Lilies.
The blooms
circled a stream of consciousness
altered by the willows and wisteria.
I watched for hours.
Altered blues morphed
into leafy lush and rose reflections.
The blush and shadows
balanced color changing greens.
Glassy hues.
Paint moved
like the summer sun
across the sky.
Irises crowned the edge.
Curved
brush strokes
splashed light.



House at Dusk

upstairs a door is closing
voices evaporate
the heat of the day is gone
outside
spent lilacs burnish color
onto panes of glass
trees spin darkness against the sky
the garden is iridescent
white clusters
of viburnum globes shimmer
in the filtering shadows
the earth shifts
you feel it if you’re silent
and then a gust of wind roars
through the trees
clouds move in but not before the stars
begin to move across the sky
they leave their pallor sails to the wind
while the crisp white moon
is forever moored to the tides

Jan Darrow is a Midwest poet that loves the haunting allure of abandoned spaces. She has been published online/print and has been nominated for Sundress Publications Best of the Net. Her book “Autumn Poetry: A Collection for the Season,” (available on Amazon) was recently recommended by Bookstr.

Photographs in Sepia / Climate Chatter by Mitali Chakravarty

Photographs in Sepia

Soft rustles weave nostalgia.
Memories of a shuffled walk,
voices that called with love,
leave imprints of the past.

They remain but shadows
of yesteryears. They never
die or disappear, but linger
as part of an unspoken life.

Photographs in sepia smile,
invoking lives that no longer
breathe. Yet, they persist as
residues of what had been.

The images do not speak
or move. They are not
videos but moments
captured in fading shades.

They waft on a soft breeze,
a faint recall, and yet, stay
a part of our very being.
Stilled, vignettes still sing.

In an unknown future, what will
these remembrances mean?

Climate Chatter 

It’s like summer in March. 

The temperature’s up. 

Near the equator, it rains. 

But now there are no clouds. 

There’s an unrelenting sun 

beating us down and haze… 

When the rain comes, 

storms thunder to bring 

down trees on cars or humans. 

Old trees are cut, replaced by new. 

Lightning strikes split the skies. 

But that is only when it rains. 

Earlier it poured everyday, 

but the trees, they stayed. 

Now, it’s seasonal and, ooh, the haze! 

Old trees near my home,

where orioles roamed, 

are now replaced by saplings. 

I watch the world change 

from my window, silencing 

the television screen. 

Mitali Chakravarty has three books of poems. She has edited two anthologies and has a book of essays. Her poems can be found in Fixator Press, Literary Yard, Daily Star, Medusa’s Kitchen, Dissident Voice among many other sites. Mitali wafts on a cloud where rests borderlessjournal.com.

The First Step is Nothing But Air by Holly Day

How brave must a little bird be
to leap from its nest into the air for the first time
to not just take that first step out onto a branch
but to actually try to fly?

A scientist would tell me that it’s all
just instinct, that your average baby bird
has less fear where heights are concerned
than a baby taking its first upright, unsteady, unaided steps

But I would tell that scientist
that they must not ever have seen
a tiny sparrow, balanced wobbly on a tree branch
noisily squawking in protest at its parents on the ground below
unwilling or unable to join them for most of an afternoon.

Holly Day’s writing has recently appeared in The NoSleep podcast, Talking River, and New Plains Review, and her published books include Music Theory for Dummies and Music Composition for Dummies. She currently teaches classes at The Loft Literary Center in Minnesota, Hugo House in Washington, and the Indiana Writers Center.

The Crofter's Daughter / The History Teacher's Tobacco Pouch by Robert Nisbet

The Crofter’s Daughter

The teacher, plump, his jacket sad

with pipe smoke, brings her to the class.

I’d like us to welcome our little Hebridean.

It’s kindly meant. Indeed the class,

eleven years old themselves, are kind enough.

But there are so many, just so many children,

hundreds, a thousand, in that steel town school.

Passing from bell to bell, from week to week,

she likes learning Welsh, likes the crafts, 

but she puzzles over rugby and the steel town’s lust

for such a muddy, heavy game. In Cornaig School,

they’d played rounders, twenty of them. 

And then her mind rushes to the island,

where the white sandy machair spread

down the furlong from their farmyard

to the beach. They had dogs with island names,

Jura, Tobermory. And she’d be milking in the byre

before she went to school. 

                                          Now the steel town

and a couple of years’ unrecognised damnation.

 

 

The History Teacher’s Tobacco Pouch

 

He’d spread a plump tobacco pouch

before him, lunch times, at bridge,

rubbing out the warm brown curls

of Erinmore, letting float a light 

Virginian scent, then tamping,

tamping down, pressing the orange

threads to service in the deep and blackened

bowl of his meerschaum. He liked

breast pocket handkerchiefs, ensigns

of red and purple, tilting oddly

askew by morning break. His nail file

would fire puffs of dust from his

pink, scrubbed nails. Only when the

lunch time bivouac had ended, would

he return to what he knew was always

there: the classroom door, the cruelty. 

 

* Both poems appeared in Roundyhouse in 2012.

Robert Nisbet is from Wales, a former high school English teacher and college creative writing tutor who has been published widely in the USA, where he has four Pushcart Prize nominations, and in Britain, where his collection, In a Small County, has just been published by Seventh Quarry Press.

Mortals / Meditation by Catherine Zickgraf

Mortals

Come out on the back porch tonight. 

You can see Jupiter above the trees,

a clean spark beside our swollen moon. 

They’ll remain when we’re forgotten.  

 

There’s grandeur in this view of life. 

We’re small under the quilt of sky,

just mortals in the backyard weeds

on a rock rounding its ancient orbit.  

 

 

 

Meditation 

 

Sometimes you write at the riverbank, 

and your words stretch wings,

slip wind, glide away.

So you let them go with joy. 

 

Sometimes you hold ideas in the depths

until they grow rosettes 

feeding honeybees, then blow away 

like seeds when it’s time.

 

Deep in the caves, you trace back 

groundwater still carving out the chalk rock. 

And with the breath of candlelight

you move through the darkness

and the humid chill of earth’s stone web

where the shadows echo.  

 

Under the outside sun, 

streams turn to lakes and estuaries.

You study the clouds that hold in the sea, 

and you see it all with your mind, not eyes.  

 

Two lifetimes ago, Catherine Zickgraf performed her poetry in Madrid. Now her main jobs are to write and hang out with her family. Her chapbook, Soul Full of Eye, is published by Kelsay Books.

 

Find her on Substack @czickgraf. Watch/read more at www.caththegreat.blogspot.com

Soul Questions / Anxious Amble by Michael Keshigian

Soul Questions

He thought about his soul

as he walked forest trails

on a summer morning,

deciding it might be solid like his heart

rather than intangible like his mind.

Yet solid meant

it would eventually fail

and break apart

like the tender wings of a moth.

And if it were,

where might it be?

Could he be sure he had one?

Do others?

The fawn that crosses his path

then scampers in fright,

had the face of a child

confronting a stranger.

The black crow that caws concern

amid the pines

warns his brethren.

Bears retreat into caves

for sleep and survival.

Surely, they may posses

what he cannot locate.

It might have a shape

like a mountain

or resemble the beady eye of a loon.

Why wouldn’t a fox have one

or the robin who tenders her young

so carefully?

For that matter, why wouldn’t

the trees, the shrubs, or the lady slippers

with their big pink heads?

All living things bleed when they are cut.

Perhaps the soul is liquid.

 

Anxious Amble

The trees, on this late summer’s eve,
coerced him into believing
they could hear his thoughts,
sense his angst as they bent over
the path upon which he strolled
while night climb slowly
down their limbs
to absorb fading shadows
that danced the trail he trespassed
as the wind whimpered a whistle.
The ample leaves flailed
and quivered their percussive timbre,
a collective voice
that seemed to answer
his queries when breezes stoked the air,
silenced when the setting sun
stifled the airstream locomotion,
mitigating nature’s delicate response.
With everything quiet, everything dark,
the remembrance of another evening’s saunter
illuminated his mind,
an evening filled with laughter,
happy hearts,
bare-feet splashing in an ocean puddle,
a romantic caress; what heavy,
hurried steps he took to keep pace
with the bright image upon him
until it too faded into the current darkness
that consumed him,
steps that eventually guided him
to the sky at path’s end,
a clouded, misty sky,
where even the stars, night’s children,
those glimmers of hope
against infinite night,
were missing as well.

Michael Keshigian has recently been published in Tipton Poetry Journal, Studio One, Spank the Carp and Jerry Jazz Musician as well as many other national and international journals.  He is the author of 14 poetry collections and has been nominated 7 times for a Pushcart prize and 3 times for Best of the Net. Michael's latest chapbook, Poems from the Sky, will be released by Cyberwit.com this month.