Christmas in My Heart

for Scott Coskie, a talented theater director who 

loved Christmas and everything Disney

Defying December winds

one blustery day,

we happily strung Christmas lights

across your front yard.

Dressed in Disney ornaments

your tree, glistening through the window

as inside, tinseled shelves of snowy cotton

set a stage for village life.

Within my mind, there still exists

a dancing Pinocchio,

the gift your heart couldn't help but crave

one Christmas long ago.

Watercolor memories,

abstracted and blurred,

melding Christmas past into Christmas present,

alive and aglow,

bringing you back each year 

as angelic characters fill my ears

and Christmas comes to my heart!

© Shelly Sitzer, 2017

Pinocchio and Cantinflas marionettes
at the National Puppet Museum
in Huamantla, Tlaxcala, Mexico
by Alejandro Linares Garcia
from Wikimedia Commons

Understanding Fiction

A two-year-old calls out “Ring, Ring!” and hands us

a play phone, and we take it and say “Hello.”

We carry on a full conversation

if need be, and chances are we need to,

smiles and all. 

                         Does it matter if the child

doesn’t follow all that we say? We could

speak of Charlie Parker and Dave Brubeck

or pray for our long-dead Uncle Hutchins,

so long as the illusion is strong.

Chances are the child plays another game

while you talk, stacking bright rings on a peg,

perhaps, or painting her nails with a toothbrush

and the dog’s water bowl.  

                                            When she grows up,

she’ll not remember much more than the phone.

Uncle Hutchins remains just a name

on a list in the family Bible,

and the giants of jazz are just as dead

as he to this child who recalls nothing

but the faded pink phone we held, our voice,

our presence. 

           It’s a time of worthy deceit,

don’t you think? And this poem a parable

that says fiction can carry a good truth,

and  that we who write know the lessons

of irony better than most; we can conjoin

the two ends of this lie about a phone

into something strong enough to outlast

this moment and carry her on somewhere

we don’t now know, but which, if we are lucky,

we’ll live to write about some day.

            © David Black, 2017

Corbin Fleming, brother of 2011 March of Dimes National Ambassador
Lauren Fleming, plays with United States President Barack Obama's telephone
during his family's visit to the Oval Office on 7 February 2012.
Photo by Pete Souza, posted to White House Flickr Account.
From Wikimedia Commons 

Pegasus Dream

A wild Pegasus grazes

next to Star B Stables in Virginia,

ready to spread his lacy wings

and rise above the weepy clouds.

But the preverbal horse

relies on the words of a fickle poet

to make him fly.

If only there were just a Pegasus problem,

an idle poet could solve it.

If only there was just one lie,

a word could make it right —

to awake the dreamer,

to raise the dead.

The brilliance of words brings confusion —

they were mighty, now they are useless.

A peek at a stranger’s grocery list

tells me more than a hundred poems.

Pegasus glimpses the leafy forest,

the steep road to a grassy field,

lusts after the weepy clouds.

But the pathetic horse cannot wing his way

without the words of the fickle poet.

On the wooden porch stands

an abandoned broken rocker.

Pegasus and poet left

to wring out a few more lines

from memories of the leafy forest,

the steep road to a grassy field,

the weepy clouds.

The sunken, colorless eyes of Pegasus —

the defeat sprang from euphoria.

© Helen Kanevsky, 2017

Four Muses and Pegasus on Parnassus
Painting by Caesar van Everdingen, c. 1650
The Hague, The Netherlands
from Wikimedia Commons