Dance! Dance! Dance!

I am dancing with a rhythm of love and laughter

I feel the drums deep inside of me,

Calling me home to the land my body yearns to find

Dance!  Dance!  Dance!

Twirl with the beat of life

Flow gently with the wind

With a strength that holds the power of your mission

Dance!  Dance!  Dance!

To the flow of life reaching deep down to find your soul

To find the core that leads you to the center of your love

And bring forth the ectasy of commitment

Dance!  Dance!  Dance!

Bring forth your ancestors

They live inside of you who are the drum of their mission

Beat out the rhythm of their song so the world may hear it

Dance!  Dance!  Dance!

For your ancestors and carry them to the end

This dance is a journey for them

Which will end when your journey is complete

So Dance!  Dance!  Dance!

© Hilda Ward, 2014

Ghanaian women dancing
Photo by USAID
from Wikimedia Commons

Stone Circle in Bute Park

On past Stonehenge, the tracks not going that way,

through Plymouth and into Wales—no plan or map 

toward what one day could hold:

Cardiff Castle and the River Taff,

a pub, a pint, and shepherd’s pie, 

and then to find the ring of druid stones.

Dating from recent years, I had learned—

but enough to stop me that afternoon

for a good half hour,

and good it was to stand there,

to take some slides, then pack the Canon

back into its bag and stare with believing eye

till I was moved to walk sunwise

three times round the power,

to tiptoe toward the Logan Stone—

stand there centered amid the twelve

and raise my arms like a gnomon

shining in the sun, to look right

toward the portal stone and wish

I had been here for Midsummer Sunrise

or maybe at midnight drawing down the moon.

From stone to feet to head to fingertips, 

the god within me wakened and this poem began to shape.

Small matter, really, when the stones arrived—

they are as old as they ever were,

and of a strength to hold within their gritty hearts

all possible chants and prayers.

© David Black, 2014

Gorstedd stones, Bute Park, Cardiff
Photo by Andy Dingley
from Wikimedia Commons

ARTIST-MOTHER; JUNKYARD-FATHER: BOTH HEROES

My mother’s colors swarmed over the canvas in her basement studio while I watched intoxicated by the smell of turpentine and oil paint.  I swarmed and am still swarming in those slathered lavish hues; some, though, were the night behind the lightning.  When her huge cat Sansloy, scared by a dog as she cuddled him, bit her deeply in the arm, she took no revenge and her bed remained his comfort.  It shames me to say that I did not justly value her soiled white collar husband, my father.  Dazed and lonely in a family of artists, he decided to paint half of what we owned in gold color, to honor his wife, making a golden small domain.  Our concrete steps became gold; our bronze gods holding a clock became gold; chairs and tables often turned gold.  But after he died I realized he saved his children and wife from homelessness.  His finicky investments fed us.  I am ashamed.  He was a better man than I after all and merited his wife more than I.

And his junkyard!  His brief treasured part ownership! S crap!  Yet what the heart discarded or forgot confirmed me as an artist. I owe him that as well as shelter.  As if Stella and Rauschenberg and the Merzbau and Frank O’Hara had baptized me!

At the age of five I climbed over my father’s junkyard fence constructed like entangled steel claws.  In temporarily fearless fierce reverie, I voyaged through what seemed like all the haughty toys we could not afford, mountain ranges of squashed rainbow plastic or tin giddy gizmos that now bored wised-up wealthy children.  I wallowed in mazes, fondled ousted wheels, weapons, torsos, wings, their still exciting insulted spectrums. Encouraged, I hopped into actual condemned automobiles and thrust myself in this one instance through the space-time continuum far outdistancing in those saurian motorless cars the starship Enterprise.  In increasingly scratchy fact, the mutant and quarantined metal around me was for me an alluringly hulking perhaps unidentified dinosaur.  I began to get cut.  I tried to ask help from a nice alien, a “gilt” birdbath.  I levitated, swaying in the lap of armless cast iron garden statues.  I began to get dented.  I skimmed through gravel and into the air on bicycle frames.  I saw sprawling art books.  I tumbled face down into a volume of Aubrey Beardsley.  Unfairly sudden, a jungle of pipes like a pile of anacondas unjokingly and unjustifiably surrounded me.  My daze was dear to me but dangerous.  I strayed bleeding and weeping for an unfunny mile until I came upon a highway like Lake Victoria.  A cop got me.  The sun remained amiably lavish overhead, slathering me with easy gold.

My father had almost lost me.  But I found sharp art and his junk endowed me with the bedazzled and dazzling wound of poetry. In that junkyard was everything that evaded nothingness for awhile, cowering or lowering or posing bravely.  I found the tangle that reveals hard dream and plush but worn reality.  I measured trashed treasure. Merciful mother!  She pardoned the cat!  She pardoned my fine father, finally.  I still inhale her oils.  But has art pardoned me?  Are you justly valued?

© Stephen Margulies, 2014

Junkyard cat
Photo by Downtown gal
from Wikimedia Commons

Cherry Blossoms

We will meet under the cherry tree

That graces the front lawn,

Where you whimsically threw your books,

Stretching beneath its blossom-laden bough.

Let us find some sprigs,

Loosened here and there,

Combining our  bouquets

To adorn the sitting room.

Ensconced by silken pink tufts,

I wait each year for you.

As falling petals skim my hair,

I envision blooms of long ago.  

© Shelly Sitzer, 2014

Cherry blossoms
Photo by Tony Russell