DIVING DUCKS ON NEW YEAR’S DAY

by Melanie Choukas-Bradley 

Art by Doug Pifer for The WV Independent Observer

Lithe buffleheads and mergansers
Newly down from Canada
Tandem dive into the rough blue Potomac
 
Wind whips the sycamores
Causing their spheres of seeds to
Dance as clouds race above
 
Next week Jimmy Carter will lie in state
And then Donald Trump returns
 
Today ducks are diving
Let’s just watch them dive

 
Melanie Choukas-Bradley is a Washington, DC naturalist and award-winning author of eight nature books, including Wild Walking—A Guide to Forest Bathing Through the Seasons, City of Trees, A Year in Rock Creek Park, and Finding Solace at Theodore Roosevelt Island. She has had several previous poems published in the The New Verse News and many poems published by Beate Sigriddaughter’s Writing in a Woman’s Voice, including four that have won “Moon Prizes.” Her poetry has also been featured on nature-oriented websites.

NEW YEAR'S EVE IN GAZA

by Donna Katzin

Part of the humanitarian zone, around Al-Aqsa University, west of Khan Yunis. February 2024, compared to December 2024. Credit: Planet Labs PBC via Haaretz, December 31, 2024

There is no shelter to keep out the cold                                     

in Deir al-Balah—no water

safe to drink or mouthfuls of food…

famine claims the children one by one,

even infants who, though barely named,

are loved.

 

Winter winds do not appear to notice,

rip through shreds of plastic

pretending to be tents,                                       

that can no longer hold together

as unspoken words and stifled prayers

stab at throats too dry to utter them.

 

Without knocking, rain pours through the openings,

soaks clothes and bedding to the skin

for days and nights that never close their eyes,

like a lethal benediction

claiming tiny souls of unblessed babies

freezing in their mothers’ arms.

 

A world away, one million revel in Times Square 

awash in bright lights and bubbly 

on the eve of the New Year.

 

 

Donna Katzin is founding and former Executive Director of Shared Interest, investing in South Africa's democratic development, and co-coordinator of Tipitapa Partners, working with Nicaraguan mothers to feed their children.  She is also a member of the Reconstructionist Movement's Tikkun Olam (Repair the World) Commission, and a published poet honored to have been included in The New Verse News.

DAYS OF ABSENCE

by Royal Rhodes

Trump’s promise of mass deportation throws undocumented Texans into fear, uncertainty. —Texas Public Radio, December 19, 2024

Was I asleep and missed the sudden Rapture

that took the nameless with familiar faces?

Where did they go, with all the little ones?

The guy who cut the hair of homeless Vets,

the smiling pizza boy, and couriers?

Our well-trimmed gardens are now overgrown.

Produce at the market costs much more—

no strawberries for even ready money.

And who will take our dogs for daily walks?

These days of absence seem so rude at best.

Are we supposed to give Grandma a bath?

She knew the helper more than she knows us.

Are they on retreat deep in the desert

in prayer and fasting from all food and water?

In church they took with us the bread and wine,

but sat apart or stood beside the door.

Have angels raised them up to Paradise?

Was it the Rapture or some plotted rupture?

Royal Rhodes is a poet whose poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, including several times in The New Verse News.

ICARUS AWAITS A NEW YEAR

by Mary K O'Melveny

We’ve long been warned:

don’t fly too close, 

that sun’s too hot,

your wings will melt.

Yet here we are.

A NASA probe,

blinking distance

from spitfire flames,

solar winds, flares,

light speed heat spots

radiating

fiery dust rings.

As a new year

dawns, the Sun will

speak its first words.

Or will it sing

a scorching torch

song that sizzles,

blisters, sears, scalds?

What did we think

when we strapped on

those beeswax wings, 

leapt out as if

we knew our fate,

the sea Petral blue,

sun gold-glazed red?

Soon enough we 

will learn how far

desire can fly

before it burns,

descending like

a blazing star.

Mary K O’Melveny, a happily retired attorney, is the author of four poetry collections and a chapbook. Her most recent, If You Want To Go To Heaven, Follow A Songbird, is an album of poems, art and music. Mary’s award-winning poems have appeared in many print and on-line literary journals and anthologies and on international blog sites, including The New Verse News. Mary’s collection Flight Patterns was nominated for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Her book Merging Star Hypotheses (2020) was a semi-finalist for The Washington Prize, sponsored by The Word Works. Mary has been three-times nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is an active member of the Hudson Valley Women’s Writing Group and her poetry appears in the Group’s two published anthologies An Apple In Her Hand and Rethinking The Ground Rules. Mary lives with her wife near Woodstock, New York.