#ENOUGH HAIKU

Sari Grandstaff is a high school librarian. Her work has appeared in TheNewVerse.News and other print and online journals. In March 2018 she has one of her haiku displayed just a few short blocks from the White House. She lives in the Catskill Mountains/Mid-Hudson Valley of New York State.

FOR EMMA GONZALEZ

by Anna M. Evans





This girl looks like a younger Joan of Arc,
whose mission, burning in her, was the spark
that helped to light her nation in the dark.
This girl looks like a younger Joan of Arc.

Her mission, burning in her, is the spark
that kindles the crowd to chant, Never again!
The NRA can’t stop this hurricane.
Her mission, burning in her, is the spark.

The crowd is solid, chanting, Never again!
They’re marching with their families for our lives,
and for the dead, whose spirit still survives.
The crowd is solid, chanting, Never again!

We’re marching with our families for our lives,
led by this girl, a younger Joan of Arc,
showing us all the way to leave our mark:
by marching with our families for our lives.

This girl, though young, is like her: Joan of Arc.
Her mission, burning in her, is the spark
to light and lead our nation out the dark.
This girl’s a heroine, our Joan of Arc.

Anna M. Evans’ poems have appeared in the Harvard Review, Atlanta Review, Rattle, American Arts Quarterly, and 32 Poems. She gained her MFA from Bennington College, and is the Editor of the Raintown Review. Recipient of Fellowships from the MacDowell Artists' Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and winner of the 2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers' Choice Award, she currently teaches at West Windsor Art Center and Rowan College at Burlington County. Her new collection Under Dark Waters: Surviving the Titanic is out now from Able Muse Press, and her sonnet collection Sisters & Courtesans is available from White Violet Press.

I'VE STOPPED COUNTING THE DEAD

by Jean L. Kreiling

She's not sure that she should suspend
her vigilance, but keeping track
has done no good, has brought no end
to savagery.  As she looks back,
it seems that nothing else has made
a difference either:  votes or signs
or marches or laws disobeyed
or protests sung.  So she resigns
herself to silent grief and guilt,
her anger now an exercise
in mute restraint.  The tomb she's built
from watchful tears and numbered sighs
commemorates too many shames.
Let someone else keep counting names.


Author’s Note: The title of the poem is a remark overheard from an elderly activist.

Jean L. Kreiling’s first collection of poems, The Truth in Dissonance (Kelsay Books), was published in 2014.  Her work has appeared widely in print and online journals, and she is a past winner of a New England Poetry Club Award, the Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters Sonnet Contest, the String Poet Prize, and the Able Muse Write Prize.