BEATRICE'S TURN

by Michelle DeRose

Beatrice (a Portrait of Jane Morris) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)

If poets are the unacknowledged 

legislators of our world, then may

their list come out as a sonnet,

an epic, an elegy for their lost

childhoods. They have more cause

than Dante to assign names

to descending rings. Only in dreams

and nightmares have sinners paid,

limbs frozen in impotent angles

like bent wisps of straw, forced

to face forever through lids locked

on open how their flesh partook in fraud.

Michelle DeRose lives and writes in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She is Professor Emerita of English at Aquinas College, where she sometimes used her specialty in epic poetry in her teaching. Every new nation/kingdom/regime established in an epic is built upon or requires the destruction of another.

TRUMPET MINISTRATIONS*

by Jennifer Davis Michael




Perhaps the application
of an ear trumpet

to amplify the cries
of a ravaged nation.

Or the sounding of a blast
heralding the doom
of democracy,
the triumph of bombast.

The ancient shofar
has yielded to tweets—
“My button is bigger”—
braying for war.

Jericho town
had beautiful walls
until Joshua bugled
and they all fell down.

John of Patmos heard seven
trumpets, unrolling
the scrolls of apocalypse,
unveiling heaven.

Our manacled minds
check Facebook and hope
for Shelleyan prophecy:
can spring be far behind?


*After mishearing the phrase “Trump administration” on the radio.

Jennifer Davis Michael is professor and chair of English at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, specializing in British Romanticism. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Southern Poetry Reviw, Cumberland River Review, Literary Mama, and Mezzo Cammin, among others. She has also published a book of criticism, Blake and the City (Bucknell, 2006).

ENLIGHTENMENT

by B.Z. Niditch

Image source: Poets for World Peace

This spring we plant
seedlings
on grounds that flower
covering the good earth,
and write in splendor
by our night lamps
as a new season rebirths
each poet's power,

Asking winter's icy justice
be gone this season
we reach  for deadlines
over a stalking press
to stamp out
in bold headlines
every reasoned grievance,

Yet the bureaucracy
drives us crazy
making us wait
in the cold for hours
and the plutocracy
ignores our pleas
for democracy,

We learn from Byron
Picasso or Shelley
with a artist's chance
for a dove's release
under the burning sun
when frightful furies
ask for war
we yearn
to walk for peace.


B.Z. Niditch is a poet, playwright, fiction writer and teacher.  His work is widely published in journals and magazines throughout the world, including: Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Art; The Literary Review; Denver Quarterly; Hawaii Review; Kadmos (France); Prism International; Jejune (Czech Republic); Leopold Bloom (Budapest);  Le Guepard (France);  Antioch Review; and Prairie Schooner, among others. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.