I Indulge My Imagination

I found a smooth river stone that fits my hand

when I grasp it that right way, 

with the flattened end toward my little finger. 

It’s easy to imagine it’s been handled by people before, 

who may have made use of it for years,

smashing nuts or grinding seeds

or simply noticing how soothingly it fits in the palm

when held just so 

before chucking it back into the river.

© Laura Seale, 2017

Probable rubbing stone
by Adam Daubney, via the UK's Portable Antiquities Scheme
from Wikimedia Commons

For Sandy Hook

Tears fall like flower petals.

Nothing left but a dry stalk of pain in the heart,

And once that is tossed aside, as it must be,

The heart is still an empty vessel,

Holding only the question WHY.

Tears fall like flower petals,

Washing up memories, washing away the immediate ache.

Once dried, petals pressed remain

A pretty picture, a sweet cache of fragrance.

Time beside the tears, healing the hurt slowly.

Tears fall like flower petals,

A remembrance of a presence

Once alive, now gone forever.

Yet the sweetness remains,

Tenderly growing peace in the heart.

© Anne Cressin, 2017

Rose memorial for victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting
Photo by Alexisrael
from Wikimedia Commons 

We Fought No War This Time

We fought no war this time to find a time

Without the likes of you who even though Cuba

Is no longer the place you hide your face

And live the life that led to Castro

While we crawled neath our desks and

Received the request to be good Dullian 

Citizens who hate what they create

And anyone they suspect to blame

For the fear of the cloud we brought aloud

In sirens that went off every Wednesday at noon

And warned that soon we would be taken over

By godless Catholics, Baptists, or blacks

In a storm of equality falsely defined in identity

Not in being equal in the eyes of God and law 

With lies and rewrites, you cover yours and others

Eyes with the grey shroud of false wisdom. 

But you don’t care, as you stand right there,

In casinos, liquor, prostitution, and dirty money

As we fight no war this time to find a time

Without the likes of you.  

Without the likes of you. 

Without the likes of you.

© Dennis Wright, 2017

Snowy egret at Key Largo
Photo by William H. Majoros
from Wikimedia Commons

My Lagging Heart

... beats in an uncertain, puzzled rhythm, 

slow to change, never in unison 

with the requests of its host.

Trapped in turbulence, my gut, 

shaken by heart’s dizziness, cycles endlessly from wet

to dry – from predictable to random, 

from motility to functionless churning.

My body’s sense of personal posture and location 

cannot itself be found.

Limb and trunk muscles exhaust themselves, 

each battling for supremacy, while my brain, 

fighting protein invaders, forgets to fuel the engines of movement.  

Inexorably, the machinery of life deteriorates, 

quietly losing 

a function here, a movement there.

My eyes miss bits of landscape, busily constructing 

what isn’t there from what is. 

My sleeper’s mind breaks out of its dream-cage and hijacks

the late-night hours with its own mad dance.

A sailor in a stormy sea, my spirit sags.  My soul prepares 

for eventual flight.  Sleepless, unhappy, 

trapped in a fool’s errand of untouchable symptoms

and unlikely treatments, I fall, then crawl 

towards the lamp that Hope lights 

at the far end of a dark tunnel.

© George Phillips, 2017

A light at the end of the tunnel
Photo by Thomas Quine
Kuching, Sarawak, Borneo, Malaysia ~ 2015
from Wikimedia Commons

BESIDE THE WATER’S EDGE

HOW GOOD IT IS

TO STOP BESIDE THE WATER’S EDGE!

I CAN’T FEEL WHAT DAY THIS IS.

I ONLY KNOW THE SUN UPON MY FACE

AND THAT EVERY TIME I RETURN TO THIS PLACE,

RIVER LOW OR HIGH, THAT

I AM ONLY I.

BARBED WIRE HAS BEEN DEVOURED 

BY THIS RIVERTREE--

WILL IT BE SO 

WITH OLD BOUNDARIES AND ME?

WILL IT BE SO WITH OLD ANGER?

ONLY LOVE SHOULD BE GUARANTEED

THE HONOR OF ETERNITY--

NOTHING ELSE COULD MATTER!

© Gerry Sackett, 2017

Entrapment, Oak, Wire, and Mist
Photo by Bob Embleton
from Wikimedia Commons