TREES IN SPRING

by Royal Rhodes

David Hockney, who died on Friday, painting in Normandy in 2020. Photograph: David Hockney in The Guardian

Hockney shaped the Lockdown into art --
an old half-timbered house in Normandy,
and made a cider-press his studio.
The synchronized, rich colors that we see
in pallid light with white tonality
in fruit trees and a pinkish sky take part
with summer greens around a bright blue pond.
"My little Bayeux tapestry, " he called
these scenes of painted whorls and arabesques.
Reflections show reality exists
in splashing drops of rain and morning mists,
as wind and moving boughs create a bond,
even if no breath of wind is felt.
One storm can set the blossom's wind-blown fates,
transforming how we viewers see ourselves.
A world we know intensifies, inflates
the voices of laments each throat creates.
We see a light that helps the winter melt,
as trees pass nutrients from heart to heart.
The openness of strokes has moved his brush
in twisting marks appearing in the hundreds,
a deft illusion of the real we rush
to feel before Corona comes to crush
us just as hoped-for Spring can truly start.

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

PLACING SEASHELLS ON GRAVES, BY PHOTOS

by Joan Leotta

 
 

The poet by the beach at Les Braves Monument, Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer

Living far now, from where
the veterans among my
beloved dead are interred,
I will place by my
father’s photo
a seashell, one that is also
a veteran of sorts, a shell
from Omaha Beach, Normandy.
 
Walking with our guide
where our soldiers landed,
my fingers, on that cool
May morning plucked,
two slim jack-knife clam shells, 
from the wet sands before the
tide could steal them back.
 
That same guide had recounted how

scientists found that

even after seventy years
sand of this place
still carried traces
of the landing party’s blood.
 
That same day, we were given roses
to lay on graves in the American cemetery.
I also laid down one of these shells,
with a few grains of sand still
clinging to its curves like
hands clasping a lifeboat
thinking that perhaps
the grains carried
DNA from a comrade of the
unknown man I visited.
 
The other of this precious pair
found its way home with me.
I did not wash it or place it in a
generic box: “Shell, France.”
Instead, I kept it aside, wrapped.
Each Memorial Day, I carefully place
that small remaining
Omaha Beach shell
with its few grains of sand
by my father’s picture.
Although he was on
Pacific Coast sands beating
back assaults from a different
Axis Power foe, he and the
Omaha Beach men
were also comrades.
I imagine the soul or souls
on the sand in my shell
communicating with my father,
trading tales of their fight for justice.
 
On Memorial Day, especially,
I think of them and
all who sacrificed their
lives for our country as does
everyone who loves
and remembers those soldiers,
everyone who loves freedom.

Joan Leotta plays with words on page and stage. She’s been published as essayist, poet, short story writer, novelist, and a two-time nominee for Pushcart and Best of the Net. Her poetry and stories have appeared in Spillwords,  One Art, The Ekphrastic Review, The Lake, and many others. She performs folktale programs most often highlighting  food, family, and strong women; she performs a one-woman show, “Meet Louisa May Alcott, Nurse and a Force in Healing America post Civil War.” Contact joanleotta[at]gmail[dot]com for her Main Street Rag poetry chapbook Feathers on Stone.

FLYOVER

by Jennifer-Leigh Oprihory




As the F-16s flew over Newark,
I wondered how many of my grandfather’s friends
who, too, lied about their ages in order to enlist

flashed back to Normandy,
whether the walls of ICU rooms at University Hospital
dissolved into the photographs he’d kept
Matryoshka-ed within boxes in his attic
until they were discovered by me,

exhaustion-emptied and grasping
for any signs of him I could still see
after both he and his Emily left the Earth,
but before the house was shuttered.

How many prayed
to trade one invisible war
for another,

the virus for vanishing neurons,

and wished
to change their ages
this one last time
to escape the draft?

Jennifer-Leigh Oprihory is a defense journalist and poet who was born in New Jersey and subsequently transplanted in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. She holds a B.A. in English Literature and Writing from New Jersey City University and an M.S. in Journalism with a Health and Science Reporting Concentration and a National Security Reporting Specialization from Northwestern University's Medill School.