MM's Represented Poems for 2008 Options

[Cleo_Serapis]

JANUARY SELECTION:



Time Piece by Frances Kennedy


Whoever said time heals all wounds has lied
like those who have will claim forgiveness brings
forgetting sooner. Sorrow, stripped of pride,
has little aptitude for hope that springs
eternally in hearts less slung by slings
and arrows, or with fortitude not mine.
Unreasoned passion, stemmed, stills everything
except a coiled impulse to unwind
pretending in the face of all that I’m just fine.

[Cleo_Serapis]

NOVEMBER SELECTIONS:


Love's Dues by Sylvia Maclagan

He left yesterday. Images of fallow roads
puncture solitude, then fade. The sun erodes
my thoughts like a dry sponge. They grow dim -
love’s tendrils wind their way around my heart
to build on solid ground a world apart
that may, by gentle force, go on and round him.

The sky is not my friend today; it casts a garish spell
on dales and dreams. It counterpoises Camelot.
O give my life a joyous plot!

I’m heartbroken, quite unwell,
denizen prisoner of inner space
where only elves dare tread and trim with lace
my memory of him; a rejected pawn
with bunker-shaped dome, afraid of dawn.
Weary nomad by my love accursed,
quarrying sadness and thirst
in uninhabited plateaus.
My life dissolves in threads...

Deities! Seers! Read the riddle of subterranean
fears, my eggshell life. Players in this game
deserve three lives, and I, poltroon,
dare not pursue the sentimental lane
with one puny chance of earthly gain.
To fall in line might take a thousand years
burrowing through love’s harsh confines-
Is it I who writes these lines?

Yet shining softly on my bed, mock moon,
a gray, autumnal calm spreads down my spine,
has stilled the pain, my oaths may undermine.

Aphrodite should have sung last rites
to my deadly wounds -- my heart’s plight.

© Sylvia Maclagan, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2008



Brood Parasites by Eisa Needham

A European robin serenades
from ivied stage … ooh twidlee dee; his hen
investigates low boulders, then invades
a crevice, moulding moss into a den
to lay her brood. Nearby, a cuckoo’s call
evokes the bubbling chuckles of his mate,
who spied the nest ensconced within the wall
and parks her eggs inside to incubate.

When hatched, those parasitic nestlings prise
the rightful babies from their cradle; feign
instinctively, their empty-bellied cries.
Dim surrogate is hoodwinked to sustain
her neonatal tricksters, picking ants
and worms, from farmer’s fertile shovelled earth.
Departing from their host, the fledglings chant
cu coo, perceptibly now twice her girth.

Soon autumn blows a cooler breeze; they crowd
to far-flung lands, enticed by warmer climes,
returning when the fields are freshly ploughed
as robins gather moss for nesting time.