Early morning town by Tim Williams (Where I Live Poetry & Photography Series)

Early morning town
by Tim Williams

Here in living in other people’s pockets town
The mad tick-tocking of the clock
Disturbs and frightens the mouse . . .
While buses pass carrying people
Some who wear hats,
Semi-bowed from the weight of constantly rained-upon heads,
Others wheelchair-bound now,
Due to a lifetime of wet dufflecoat and webbed wellied feet

Where in this muffled Welsh town
Where the summer came Saharad for a week,
and burned to a crisp we stood in the melting tarmac streets
looking skywards in wonder and surprise
at the strange glow in the sky,
Still clad in hat, dufflecoats and wellies
I know daft, but it caught us out, see,
we weren’t expecting it

Mrs. Portmanto dies, a terrible thing,
well I mean it wan’t surprising really
pulling that two-wheeled, tartan-chequed,
full to bursting with tinned food trolley
up a 1 in 3 hill in that heat, in a half damp,
now drying dufflecoat, hat and molten wellies
she stuck to the pavement by Coronation road and fried,
A terrible, terrible affair

The town stands giblets bare to the elements
being probed, prodded and felt up
by the writer pushing his pen uphill
checking every cavity, like a prison body search
No door left unpicked, No window left unpeeped,
No back entrance undiscovered

The smell of smoked Woodbine fish
creeps around a fishmongered corner,
Like a river town early morning mist,
as Dai “I take my bicycle to bed” Davies,
rises early to freewheel after breakfast
down the 1 in 3 , like oil, he slips,
a quiet shadow down to the bakery doors

The early bus coughs, and gear-box grinds
its way up the winding hill
Past number 3 Tumbledown Cottages
third past the post box on the left
Where Mrs. Evans stares through a paned window
at the chapel graveyard where
her best-suited husband
still dances underground,
Other than the incident, she recalls
“everyone said, it was a damn good knees-up!”

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: The poem is a comical sendup of the town Ammanford in the Amman Valley of Carmarthenshire, Wales. The weather changes in such small degrees that it is hardly worth changing out of winter clothing, and so should a heatwave happen if only for one day the residents would not be prepared. This is the story of what may happen on such a day.

IMAGE: “Wind Street, Ammanford, Wales” (early 1900s), found at this website.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Tim Williams was born and brought up in the coal mining valleys of south Wales, and did various jobs over the years — mainly in the antiques trade. Has been a singer songwriter for 35 years, and three years ago tried his hand at poetry as opposed to song lyrics — and having a little success started performing his poetry at festivals and gigs around Wales. He has had a few poems published in books and on websites in Wales and the UK and in 2014 won an award in Milan, Italy, and has had a few poems published on websites in USA. His first book of poems Are you reading that poetry book you’re sitting on it is due in 2015. He has a Facebook site Tim Williams Welsh Poet and features on Cosmofunnel, an American poetry and writing site.

A Grey Place? by Lynn White (Where I Live Poetry & Photography Series)

A GREY PLACE?
by Lynn White

This is a grey place,
there’s no denying.
Grey slate, grey granite,
grey houses built of both.
And it rains a lot, there’s no denying.
Vertical, or horizontal, or swirling rain
falling greyly from heavy misty clouds.
But when caught by a sunbeam
it makes glistening slides
shimmering across the slate
and falls in bright white tails
or snakes like silver
where the mountains leak it.
And spills heavily over rocks,
its foaming, frothing, yellow ruffed
cascades catching rainbows as they crash
then spitting them back out
in a fine spray of colours.
And now there’s no grey
in the dark blue, black sky
filled with gold and silver twinkles.
No grey at all in this place now,
there’s no denying.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: The small town where I live has the reputation of being grey, rainy, and therefore miserable. I have taken this idea and used it to show the positive side of this which reflects how I feel about the place.

IMAGE: “Snowdonia, North Wales” by Andy Astbury. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy, and reality. Her poem “A Rose For Gaza” was shortlisted for the Theatre Cloud War Poetry for Today competition in October 2014 and has since been published in the Poetry For Change Anthology by Vending Machine Press. Poems have also recently been included, or are forthcoming, in Harbinger Asylum’s A Moment To Live By anthology, Stacey Savage’s We Are Poetry an Anthology of Love poems, In The World Of Womyn’s She Did It Anyway anthology, the launch issue of Anomalie and Callope and Phizzog among others.

Sunset over Tempe Buttes by Andrea Janelle Dickens (Where I Live Poetry & Photography Series)

Sunset over Tempe Buttes
by Andrea Janelle Dickens

the mystery fireballs pull
back, fail to travel –
splish, splash and dash
on rivers run dry.
under the curtain of red
embers, new fractures
lurk and die in the wake
of ground found troubled,
under the hood of creating
masks extending watchful
as one more midweek
victim slips away.
where are the coyotes that devote
watchful eyes to the movement of
the guilty in a ground rocked with heat?

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: The first draft of this poem was created during National Poetry Month, April 2014, as part of the Oulipost project organized by the Found Poetry Review. Oulipo poetry is where mathematics and chance generation meet art. During that month, participating poets were given a number of mathematical or random word-generating prompts based on local newspaper articles. Each of these poems originated in the development of chance using words found in the source texts and then slightly edited into their final form. One of the interesting effects of this project, for me, was the injection of the local and the political into my writing, as well as a tone of judgment or anger. This last in particular fascinated me, since I’d always naively assumed news was at least somewhat impartial, until I began working closely with the language of my local newspapers.

SOURCE: “Sunset over Tempe Buttes”: From various headlines of the Arizona Republic, 9 April, 2014. Print.

IMAGE: “The View” (Sunset, Hayden Mountain, Tempe, Arizona) by Gerry Groeber. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Andrea Janelle Dickens lives in the Sonoran Desert, among the year-round sunshine and saguaro cacti. Her work has appeared in Star 82, cakestreet, Rivet, Ruminate, Caesura, and The Wayfarer, among others. She teaches at Arizona State University, and when she’s not teaching, she’s backpacking in foreign cities, making pottery in her ceramics studio, or tending hives of bees.

Like an old lovely pear, poem by Mathias Jansson (Homonyms and Homophones Poetry Series)

Like an old lovely pear
by Mathias Jansson

Homophones are not homophobes
They are words that like each either
They have a common sound sole
Sorry I meant of course sound soul
They are like an old lovely pear
Or perhaps it should be spelled pair?
Like when you complain about your girl’s watch
That has a loud annoying tic
And she slaps you in the face
Because she thought you said thick
Or when you order mousse for dessert
And they bring you a piece of moose instead
Life is never easy with words sounding the same
And have a different meaning of what you say
When people hear your explanation
I had a blew moved because of the morning
And you really tried to say
I had a blue mood because of the mourning
You can only reply with a sine
People only here what they want to reed

IMAGE: “Two Yellow Pears on Folded Linen” by Carol Leigh. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mathias Jansson is a Swedish art critic and poet. He has contributed with visual poetry to magazines such as Lex-ICON, Anatematiskpress, Quarter After #4, and Maintenant 8: A Journal of Contemporary Dada. He has also published a chapbook at this is visual poetry and contributed with erasure poetry to anthologies from Silver Birch Press. Visit him at mathiasjansson72.blogspot.se, or his author’s page at Amazon.com.

Self-Portrait in a Convex Faucet, poem by Cynthia Anderson (Self-Portrait Poetry Series)

SELF-PORTRAIT IN A CONVEX FAUCET
by Cynthia Anderson

The shine of chrome forms a mirror,
the essence of surprise, as I lean over the sink
and find myself doubled, with no more substance
than a passing cloud. The woman I see there
has a face intensified by worry and age,
yet a torso that whispers out of time,
miraculously youthful through a trick
of perception. Outside, the low roar
in the pines tells me the wind is up—
a sound I know intimately, like the pounding
of blood in my body, a sound I could listen to
forever, and would, if given the chance—
but, having only the moment, I grab my camera,
hold it over my face, and click.

IMAGE: “Multiple self-portraits in the skin of a faucet” by Guy Ricketts. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  Cynthia Anderson lives in the high desert near Joshua Tree National Park. Her poetry books include In the Mojave, Shared Visions, and Shared Visions II. She is co-editor of the anthology A Bird Black As the Sun: California Poets on Crows & Ravens.

Visit her at cynthiashidesertblog and andersonwritingservices.com.

A Summer Garden, poem by Louise Glück

A SUMMER GARDEN (Excerpt)
by Louise Glück

Several weeks ago I discovered a photograph of my mother
sitting in the sun, her face flushed as with achievement or triumph.
The sun was shining. The dogs
were sleeping at her feet where time was also sleeping,
calm and unmoving as in all photographs.

I wiped the dust from my mother’s face.
Indeed, dust covered everything; it seemed to me the persistent
haze of nostalgia that protects all relics of childhood.
In the background, an assortment of park furniture, trees and shrubbery.

The sun moved lower in the sky, the shadows lengthened and darkened.
The more dust I removed, the more these shadows grew.
Summer arrived. The children
leaned over the rose border, their shadows
merging with the shadows of the roses.

A word came into my head, referring
to this shifting and changing, these erasures
that were now obvious—

it appeared, and as quickly vanished.
Was it blindness or darkness, peril, confusion?

Summer arrived, then autumn. The leaves turning,
the children bright spots in a mash of bronze and sienna . . .

MORE: To read “A Summer Garden” by Louise Glück in its entirety, visit poetryfoundation.org.

PHOTO: Vintage photograph of a woman with a dog, available at ebay.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Louise Glück was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2003, after serving as a Special Bicentennial Consultant three years prior in 2000. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently, Poems 1962-2012 (2012), A Village Life: Poems (2009), Averno (2006), The Seven Ages (2001), and Vita Nova (1999), winner of Boston Book Review’s Bingham Poetry Prize and The New Yorker‘s Book Award in Poetry. In 2004, Sarabande Books released her six-part poem “October” as a chapbook. Her other books include Meadowlands (1996), The Wild Iris (Ecco Press, 1992) — winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award — Ararat (1990), for which she received the Library of Congress’s Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, and The Triumph of Achilles (1985), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Boston Globe Literary Press Award, and the Poetry Society of America’s Melville Kane Award. In 2008, Glück was selected to receive the Wallace Stevens Award for mastery in the art of poetry. Her most recent collection, Poems 1962-2012, was awarded the 2013 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is a writer-in-residence at Yale University.

Firefly haiku by Matsuo Basho

FIREFLY HAIKU
by Matsuo Basho (1644-1694)

Blade of grass
a firefly lands
takes off again.

PHOTO: “Female firefly in the grass” by Rick Lieder, bugdreams.com, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Prints available at 500px.com.

Summer haiku by Matsuo Basho

SUMMER HAIKU
by Matsuo Basho

The summer world
floats in the lake
waves wash over

IMAGE: “Reflections” by Christopher and Amanda Elwell. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.

rain poem by A.D. Winans

rain poem
by A.D. Winans

the storm
lets up

the birds
take flight

neighbors dog
sheds water

drops in
sprinkler rhythm

a cavalry
of children

magically appear
in rainbow splendor

sun peeks
from clouds

smell of fall
in the air

PHOTO: “Rainbow Over the Golden Gate” by Ei Katsumata. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.

Visit A.D. Winans at his website to learn more about his poetry and poetry collections.

What We Need Is Here, poem by Wendell Berry

WHAT WE NEED IS HERE
by Wendell Berry

Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.

SOURCE: “What We Need Is Here” appears in The Collected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1957-1982 (North Point Press, 1987), available at Amazon.com.

PHOTO: “Geese in Flight, Oregon” by Catia Juliana. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Wendell Berry is a novelist, poet, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. A prolific author, he has written dozens of novels, short stories, poems, and essays. He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a recipient of The National Humanities Medal, and the Jefferson Lecturer for 2012. He is also a 2013 Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Berry has been named the recipient of the 2013 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award.