Marianne Brems, Unsung Offerings
The Owl on the Fence
She sits with focused purpose.
Her tail is long, too long.
Her head bobs slightly with the breeze,
an odd movement.
The rest of her is still, too still.
She lingers longer than I expect.
But I believe her.
I think she is a living, breathing warrior.
Yet she is here to deceive.
That’s her one ambition.
She has no blood, no bones, nor stomach,
no hunter’s vision of mice and squirrels.
Hollow she sits,
a coquette of sorts,
to convince birds
danger lies within her lifeless beak.
What need has she of a heart and lungs
when vacant plastic is enough?
We the deceived, the birds and I,
with our protoplasmic brains
provide no match for her clever ways.
J. R. Solonche, Life Size
Peony Buds
If you hadn’t seen them before,
you would not know
what these peony buds have in store.
Their heads will be the heft of cabbages.
Their color will be as rich roses,
and they will be weighed
down as though from the color alone.
If left on their own,
they will bow so low
to the ground they will look like
they are bowing before a king
who will never tell them to arise and go.
Sarah Watkinson, Photovoltaic
A Song of Thermodynamics
Blanched cords of couch grass tangle on the fork.
Tread-moulded casts of earth mess up the floor.
Does order – or disorder – come from work?
New sunbeams pick out cobwebs in each nook.
The smallest must know what their toil is for.
Blanched cords of couch grass tangle on my fork.
What’s entropy, to spiders in the murk?
For wood mice in the wainscot, what’s a law?
Does their – or my – disorder come from work?
What’s buried isn’t dead. That’s just our talk.
Worms know that our remains are what life’s for
And spongy touchwood crawls upon the fork.
Earth loves decay. Its microbes feed on muck
Foul bags of bird shit, vegetable hair.
Does order or disorder come from work?
Roots live on captured sunshine in the dark.
Wake up! Smell the geosmin! Petrichor!
Fat couch grass rhizomes come up on my fork.
My order, their disorder – human work.
Nina Zivancevic, Rollerskating Notes
The Raven
(after E.A. Poe)
And it does not mean that
all the things won’t return with their dreadful refrain ‘never more’,
remember René Char who said that “everything that was
taken was returned to him, even his little red truck,”
but what it means is they won’t come back with that crazy, insane-
but to me so dear, adorable in-ten-si-ty;
Oh, your pupil, raven, glistening in your oily eye-
shows you at your best, the perfect, arrogant and abusive creature,
domineering; your shape of a lonely bird - foreboding,
your eye, translucent and penetrating, observes me intensely
just this morning, as you land on my Kerala terrace,
yes you do and then take fruits from my palm, I’ve just cut it
for you, as you gobble these pieces from my hand,
I hear myself whispering semi-absently
“never more”, “never more”...
It's not easy getting a book or pamphlet accepted for review these days. So in addition to the regular review section, the One Poem Review feature will allow more poets' to reach a wider audience - one poem featured from a new book/pamphlet along with a cover JPG and a link to the publisher's website. Contact the editor if you have released a book/pamphlet in the last twelve months or expect to have one published. Details here
Reviewed in this issue
Share
Print