TREE TRIPTYCH

by Beth Evans

 

Cuttings

 
I walked the yard recently,
Past the chickens,
You know them well by now,
The compost creators.
Walked until I saw the damaged Rose-of-Sharon.
 
A branch, several branches,
Hung bent to the ground,
Clinging to the center trunk
With shaving of themselves,
Like the first loose tooth of a child,
Hanging by a thread of flesh,
About to part company.
 
I ripped the clinging branches from their mother,
Threw them aside,
More compost,
Feedings for new life,
Leaving a wounded mother,
With one branch embedded, still,
At her side,
No sign of its leaving home.
The mother tree reaching up towards the sky,
Bare,
Bare of most of her branches,
Bare of most of the tender leaves
That the branches shoot out each year,
Year after year,
New every time,
The ever-changing interests and pursuits of her children.
But now they are gone.
As is their future.
 
I have heard,
That entire branches of families
Have been obliterated.
The mother, the father, the grandchildren,
The mother of them all, the grandmother.
Obliterated.
There will no longer be changing interests and pursuits.
There will no longer be their future.
 

Reachings

 
This tree,
This mother has wandering branches
That reach in an undulating choreography towards places,
Each other has never been.
They have their interests,
They follow their pursuits,
They live in their present
And towards their futures.
Not a single one has been cut down,
Though they all range far from the center,
Pilgrimage, the Hajj, Aliyah.
Risking annihilation in the
Moving winds of time and space.
The center holds.
I tell Yeats.
It is in their wandering,

Courage of exploration and redefinition,

That the core gains its strength.
 

Leavings

 
I woke this morning with a poem in my head.
                The black sheep
                Creep
                Away.
                They never fit in their flock.
                Do better in the outskirts,
                Do better where they find other black sheep,
                Or pink sheep,
                Or green sheep,
                Or no sheep at all.
                And find their home among the antelopes,
                Or the orangutans,
                Or even among the wolves.
 
My son has left me,
Gone to find his new home
In the mountains or the meadows or a desert,
Like the branches of the bush that now lie rotting in my yard,
Like the branches that leap from the undulating tree,
Like the sheep that leave the flock.
He tells me,
That when he has a daughter,
He will name her Rose of Sharon,
And he has not even read the Grapes of Wrath,
Or the Bible.
But he has walked in this same yard,
Past the chickens,
Past the wounded tree,
When in his day,
It grew strong and whole,
As wood should,
And he will still,
See a future,
And procreate.

The poet, Beth Evans, lives in Brooklyn, NY and writes with the Thursday Morning Poets. She holds a master's degree in English literature and works as an academic librarian. She is currently overseeing the care and maintenance of her son's 23 chickens in her urban backyard with her pitbull Chichi and her cat Shadow.

DON’T KID YOURSELF

by Steven Kent

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst

are full of passionate intensity." 

—W.B. Yeats, "The Second Coming"

“I thought I was writing fiction in The Handmaid’s Tale.”  

—Margaret Atwood, The Atlantic, May 13, 2022

"It cannot happen here," we claim;

"Our country couldn't be that bad!"

But we may live to find the fame

M. Atwood found in Gilead.

Steven Kent is the poetic alter ego of writer, musician, and Oxford comma enthusiast Kent Burnside. His work appears in Light, Lighten Up Online, Snakeskin, and OEDILF, among others.

FOUND POEM OF WAR

by Ellen Austin-Li

Newborn twin brothers sleep in a basement used as a bomb shelter at the Okhmadet children's hospital in central Kyiv, Ukraine, Monday, Feb. 28, 2022. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

A line from Yeats’ poem that reverberates

like a bass chord that becomes a strum,

combined with an image of babies 

kept alive in a bomb shelter, underground,

each breath bagged by ambu into tiny lungs.

This hum an undercurrent—under, under, under

my thumb. This rough beast lumbering, a ton,

a hundred years running, but truly thousands before, 

more’s the sum of history in a new poem—not new, 

but old. What crumbling humans, such endless war.

My hands weary as if I’m delivering each breath.

I know what this means—we cannot take a rest

or the children expire. I tire, but the poem is found.

The cannon, the fodder: explosions of sound. 

Ellen Austin-Li’s work has appeared in Artemis, Thimble Literary Magazine, The Maine Review, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Rust + Moth, and other places. Her two chapbooks were published by Finishing Line Press—Firefly (2019) and Lockdown: Scenes From Early in the Pandemic (2021). She is a Best of the Net nominee. A recipient of the Martin B. Bernstein Fellowship, she earned an MFA in Poetry at the Solstice Low-Residency Program. Ellen lives with her husband in a newly empty nest in Cincinnati, Ohio.

AMERICA 2017: TWO WORLDS, WORLDS APART

by George Salamon


"The study shows that stagnating wages and inequality are deeply entrenched...and that inequality in lifetime incomes will persist and even worsen," in "Work and Reward: The Great Disconnect," The New York Times, July 6, 2017

Image source: Robin Ayres Pinterest: Art – Globes

Few things are more difficult
Than to move the powerful
And prosperous to pity.
Their heads are spreadsheets
For the accumulation of wealth,
Their hearts vessels for
Blood turned ice cold.
The poor may not obey the law
Because of utter need,
The rich do not obey the law
Because of extreme greed.
They live in worlds
So far apart
The center could not hold.

And there is no second coming.

George Salamon lives in St. Louis (MO) County, just outside the city of St. Louis. The two are worlds apart.