THE GOOD NEWS

by Joanne De Simone Reynolds

AI-generated image from Dreamstime.

for

billions:

 

white

bird

 

column 

of 

smoke:

 

America’s

leonine

antidote

 

to

vice

 

injustices 

 

+ dogedom 

 

Joanne De Simone Reynolds watches the progress of the nation and the world from the shoreline of the Atlantic Ocean. Some of her work can be viewed at http://theumbrellaarts.org/

IN THESE FEARFUL TIMES I FIND THE THING WITH FEATHERS AT HOME DEPOT

by Lois Marie Harrod

AI-generated graphic by Shutterstock for The New Verse News

It’s been dismal—

the mice began invading my cupboarded coconut flakes

because, said my neighbor Ed, who knows about such things,

it’s so hot outside they come into the cool, and my neighbor Cheryl

started calling me The Mouse Slayer,  

because I snapped seven of their hot little necks,

and then a thunderstorm wedged the roof vent flap open,

letting the storm leak onto the toilet where I was sitting,

and a dead squirrel deposited himself in my yard,

and because my dead husband can no longer do it,

I had to shovel the desiccated little rodent into a garbage bag

because the ground is too dry to dig a proper grave,

and then the spin switch on my forty-seven-year-old washing machine

gave up like democracy, and I had to wring out the bath towels,  

hand by arthritic hand, and scoop out gallons of water with a measuring cup.

Next I had to go off to The Home Depot where I spent more than I hoped

on a new ecologically-friendly washing machine, 

and when the bearded salesman gave me the receipt,

he said, And what do you think of what’s going on in this world?

Who are you voting for?

 

And, yes, I was afraid to answer. I knew what was coming . . .

 

but I said Kamala anyway, because what could this 6-foot bearded guy

in an orange apron do to a less than 5-foot customer in The Home Depot?

Shoot me?

But his beard spread into a grin, and he said Good,

and spent another 27 minutes telling me about his grandfather,

a holocaust survivor, and his uncle who saved 19 people at Pearl Harbor,

and how Hitler came into power and just how would-be dictators

are still coming into power—all of which I knew—but he needed me to listen.

 

And, yes, as I left, Emily Dickinson’s Hope,

that little thing with feathers, flitted down the paint aisle—

but Emily, are you listening from your grave?—

you are wrong, that little bird does demand a crumb from us,

many crumbs from us.

We must feed her.

Lois Marie Harrod’s recent publications include her 18^th  poetry collection Spat (Finishing Line Press, 2021) and her chapbook Woman (Blue Lyra, 2020). Dodge poet, life-long educator and writer, she is published in literary journals and online ezines from American Poetry Review to Zone 3.

BIRDCAST

by David Chorlton

World Migratory Bird Day May 11, 2024
BirdCast

Two million birds crossed the county last night

moving to where starlight

lands. It’s springtime in the sky, two thousand

four hundred feet at midnight high,

feather bright and quiet

along the true path north. It’s dark enough

 

up there to feel

the pull of a remembered place

while down here the sleeping mountains roll

to one side or the other, and the creeks

keep flowing on the way

to being rivers. Forests sparkle

with the sounds of insects,

the desert exhales, radios are tuned

 

to the secrets only darkness knows

and they play softly while

the count begins. Orioles, flycatchers

and chats; there they go, a million, a thousand,

a hundred and the one

grosbeak who already knows

the tree she will nest in.

David Chorlton is a longtime resident of Phoenix, now living close to an extensive desert preserve that runs through the city. His neighbors include coyotes and the hawk families that nest between the human and natural worlds. They often make their way into his painting and writing life.

AMERICAN HAIKU: NEW NORMAL IS NORMAL AGAIN

by Chad Parenteau

Chad Parenteau hosts Boston's long-running Stone Soup Poetry series. His latest collection is The Collapsed Bookshelf. His poetry has appeared in journals such as Résonancee, Molecule, Ibbetson Street, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Tell-Tale Inklings, Off The Coast, The Skinny Poetry Journal, Nixes Mate Review, and the anthology Reimagine America from Vagabond Books. He serves as Associate Editor of the online journal Oddball Magazine. His American Haiku appear every Wednesday on his blog, which can be found via the link on his website.

WHAT IS THERE TO DO

by Jan Harris

Valeria Hlodan, her baby daughter Kira, and Valeria’s mother Liudmila died in the missile strike on 23 April. (Picture: @myroslavapetsa; Rex via Metro.)

after seeing the photograph from Odesa

of a mother and her new baby girl

killed by a missile-strike

 

but lay down the bread

your throat will no longer swallow

and rest your eyes

 

on the bird that alights

on the sweet-smelling lilac 

by your door,

 

notice his glossy black cap,

yellow breast glowing

in warm April sun,

 

how he stays for a moment,

how swiftly

he flickers away.

 

 

Jan Harris’s poetry has appeared in various literary journals, including Acumen, Atrium, and Poetry Wales, and in anthologies, including several e-books published by Poetry Kit. She received third place in the Wales Poetry Award, 2019. Her first collection, Mute Swans on the Cam, was published by Oversteps Books in July 2020.

MIGRANT

by Matt Witt

Green-Tailed Towhee Taking Bath by Matt Witt

This green-tailed towhee

that weighs about an ounce

migrated more than 1,000 miles

from its wintering home in Mexico

to its annual nesting ground

in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument,

where I watched it taking a bath at a tiny spring.

 

It migrates every year,

eluding hawks and falcons,

braving snowstorms and lightning,

never losing its way.

 

This bird is a lot stronger

than I’ll ever be.

Matt Witt is a writer and photographer from Talent, Oregon. His website is MattWittPhotography.com.

A PANDEMIC PRAYER

by Roderick Deacey

Don’t let me die a COVID death

pinned and tied by wires and tubes,

felled by fear and pain,

enduring dark visions

from potions that numb and confuse,

unable to touch the infinite,

losing the inevitable tussle for breath.

Instead, let me choose a worm’s death,

gently stilling movement

in the warm black soil.

Feeling the earth shiver and move

as it wraps me in its vast body

and cradles me

in its perpetual swing around the sun.

Or let me walk into the ancient forest

and sense the slow sap of centuries

sliding through the rough bark I lean against.

Let me mark the deep rhythm of the wood

as I feel myself slowly sink

into the tree’s heart,

to rest serene among leafy limbs.

Best of all, let me die a bird’s death,

swooping and swirling

high in a star-pricked sky—

not even aware

of tumbling flesh and feathers falling

as I joyously fly on

toward that brilliant rainbow slash of dawn.

Roderick Deacey is a performing poet in the DC area, based in Frederick, MD. In normal, non-viral times, he regularly performs with his drummer/percussionist and bass-player, presenting “neo-beat” poems inspired by the Beat Poets’ poetry and jazz forays of the nineteen-fifties. His beat poetry chapbook neo-beatery ballads was published in 2019. Deacey was awarded the 2019 Frederick Arts Council Carl R. Butler Award for Literature. Crossing genres, he won the Gold Award for best lyrics in the 2020 Mid-Atlantic Song Contest held by the Songwriters Association of Washington.

THE OLDEST WILD BIRD, WISDOM

by Pepper Trail

An albatross named Wisdom, the world’s oldest banded bird, has returned to an annual breeding ground in the Pacific Ocean and laid an egg—at the age of at least 69. The Laysan albatross was first fitted with a leg band in 1956 by biologists studying the life cycle of the birds. It meant that she could be identified among the three million individuals that nest at the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge. —The Times (UK), December 5, 2020. Photo: Wisdom and her mate take turns for eight-hour shifts on the nest. Her return is considered a triumph for conservationists. Credit: WESSEX NEWS AGENCY

My father, gunner's mate, and your father, albatross

Somehow survived the Pacific War, and I imagine them

Inhabiting the same embattled sea, yours forever on the wing

Mine on endless watch, one day disbelieving the sight - 

No enemy, but that mythic bird, aloft

 

Postwar, your parents returned to bomb-cratered Midway

Where the stubble-headed sailors called them gooney birds

Where together they scratched a hollow between the runways

And from their ecstatic mating, their patient incubation

Hatched a chick, those sixty-nine years ago, you

 

Peacetime, safe again inside the continent, my father

Courted and married, and with his small bright bride

Produced me, firstborn, same year as you

My father's son, fated to be storm-tossed

Lover of birds, student of the albatross

 

As a youth, you were caught, handled, ringed

Given a number that began your history

Year by year, decade by decade, your life flew

Detached itself from the rest, soared above

Brought you to our notice, gave you a name

 

Wisdom, you have become a legend

But are not burdened, your endless voyaging

Simply your life, made up of days of wind

Content with the landscape of waves

Free upon your outstretched wings

 

Yet most years a moment comes that turns you back

Rearranging your feathers to seek the land

Where your mate waits, and the world waits

Today, with the news of your return, I bow my gray head

As you lift your wings and, once more, dance

 

Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.

STYMIED

by George Held

T***p wears mask in public for 1st time. The president told reporters, “I've never been against masks,” before departing the White House for Walter Reed Medical Center. Credit: Patrick Semansky/AP via ABC News, July 12, 2020

That is no planet for old men, or young –
the Earth contaminated by a virus
so deadly that in one great city
one in three hundred has become

infected and in a tiny Arkansas town
one in nineteen, and all the while
the most powerful man on Earth
wears no mask, except at Walter Reed.

Maybe a mask offers no more protection
than a rubber with a hole in it
but still, the President might wear one
at least to show concern for prophylaxis;

so those who mask up to walk to the post
office must encounter strapping young women
and men whose aplomb, arrogance, or disregard
for more vulnerable citizens

lends even a commonplace sortie
a risk like charging a machinegun
nest on Iwo Jima. But most old folks know
their time is up and dying from the virus

can be more efficient than falling victim
to a malignancy. An aged human
is but a decrepit thing, unlikely to remain
a golden bird upon a golden bough,

much less to sing to a careless emperor…

George Held, a longtime contributor to TheNewVerse.News, is sheltering in Eastern Long Island.

HOPE: APRIL 2020

by Marjorie Maddox

Print by jolieguillebeau

A “thing,” perhaps,
and fowl,
       but bloody-
plucked,
dipped in disease
and plummeting,
the sky-high                       yours/mine
                   violently de-plumed,
bald as a vulture,
               fickle flight undone
in this freefall frenzy of fear
to doom
become dust
 become

what we don’t know
                        become
before
            and void
become dark, become
                         the dawn crack
of Eden on replay
and maybe—hope against hope—
become
the “warm breasts, bright wings”
of Spirit hovering,
                        warming,
readying its weary-
world nest
once-again
for wings.

Marjorie Maddox has published 11 collections of poetry, a short story collection, an anthology (co-editor), and 4 children's books.

SOCIAL DISTANCING

by John W. Steele

Not knowing who is shedding Novel Corona,
it’s not so bad to huddle in our caves

plugged into our phones and laptops, Zoom.
As for lining up in bare-shelved stores

who needs toilet paper, food and drink,
soap and sanitizer anyway?

Meanwhile the crocs have stopped their bellowing,
called a truce. They’ve reached across the swamp

and offered one another bite-sized hunks.
The old-bird alpha-male has softened his tweets

and started to squawk about how he is going to kill
the virus. November looms large. The other crocs,

afraid he’ll chase them from the swamp, are cowering,
hoping he won’t snap and spill their blood.

John W. Steele is a psychologist, yoga teacher, assistant editor of Think: A Journal of Poetry, Fiction and Essays, and graduate of the MFA Poetry Program at Western Colorado University, where he studied with Julie Kane, Ernest Hilbert and David Rothman. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Amethyst Review, Boulder Weekly, Blue Unicorn, Copperfield Review, Heron Clan Anthology, IthacaLit, The Lyric, Mountains Talking, The Orchards, Society of Classical Poets, Urthona Journal of Buddhism and the Arts, and Verse-Virtual. He was nominated for a Pushcart prize, won The Lyric’s 2017 Fall Quarterly Award, won an award in the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition, and was awarded Special Recognition in the 2019 Helen Schaible International Sonnet Contest. His book reviews have appeared in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and Raintown Review.

MARS

by David Feela

isn’t ours

but what if

as our InSight

touched down, 

shaking pink dust 

off its gadgets

a robot camera

whirred and clicked

to photograph 

the horrified face

of a dodo—

the same bird 

we never suspected

could survive 

an interplanetary

migratory escape  

from a feckless 

flightless human race.

David Feela writes a monthly column for The Four Corners Free Press and for The Durango Telegraph. A poetry chapbook, Thought Experiments, won the Southwest Poet Series. The Home Atlas appeared in 2009. A Collection of his essays, How Delicate These Arches, was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. Unsolicited Press will release his new chapbook, Little Acres, in April 2019.

BIPARTISAN TO BIPENNATE

by John Beaton

Eagle with One Wing by Christopher Hall.

I saw a bird with just one wing.
The poor thing could not fly;
it fluttered in a clockwise ring.
Another squawked nearby,

similarly handicapped,
but anticlockwise in
the one-winged way it feebly flapped.
They filled me with chagrin

and then a bright idea brewed—
what if I was to tie
the two together? Then they could
Siamesely fly.

And so they did, the left wing and
the right, united, flew.
It happened in cloud cuckoo land—
one wing was red, one blue.



John Beaton, a retired actuary who was born in Scotland, is a widely published poet and spoken word performer from Vancouver Island, Canada.

NO LONGER CONFINED

by Johnnie Clemens May

Molested as a child
And mute for six years,
Yet you, with regal voice
And erect frame,

As an adult sang sweetly.
Never, once released, did you cease to ascend,
Giving so many fledglings silken wings.
Even Elijah could not work as many wonders.
Love was the creed
On which you based a life
Unlike any other’s:

Rich in word wisdom,
Insistent that the dove would soar,
Persistent in your dance of affirmation.


Johnnie Clemens May has an MFA in poetry from Pacific University and teaches English and creative writing at Glendale Community College in Arizona. 

INSTRUCTIONS

by Laurie Lamon

Image source: Mind Maps

Put them into the scissors’ ovals made for making

parts; fold them into the shape of the bird

crossing a wall, then vanishing into light’s room.

Let one warm the face turned on its side;

let one come to the breast as a sleepwalker touches

a door. Let them both envy the tongue.            

Let them count money like miseries that close

the eyes. Have them write in pencil the forty-two

resolutions against Israel. Have them handle

and return the identity cards of those who are here

and not here. Let them ease the burdens of smoke.

Instruct them to scatter straw, earth’s estate

to be carried in the mouths of the smallest animals.

Laurie Lamon's work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New Criterion, Ploughshares, Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture, Plume, and other magazines and journals, including 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Ordinary Days, edited by Billy Collins, and thePoetry Daily and Verse Daily websites. In 2007 Lamon received a Witter Bynner award, selected by Poet Laureate Donald Hall. Lamon has also received a Pushcart Prize. Laurie Lamon has two collections of poetry are The Fork Without Hunger and Without Wings, CavanKerry Press (NJ), 2005 and 2009. Lamon is a professor of English at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington and the poetry editor for Rock & Sling.