INTERSECTION

by Dick Westheimer

after the reading of "The Hill We Climb” 

Your sons and daughters shall prophesy; 

Your old shall dream dreams, 

And your youth shall see visions.

Joel 3:1

The poet shown like a nova, a new star rising from the dais, 

She spoke brilliance that rivaled the light that streamed through 

the parting clouds, but like any sun, could not see the shadows 

cast by her own bright light—only the glow on the faces 

of a nation reflected back to her as she rose fierce and lyrical.

Most of the elders gathered there—like lunar satellites 

in a sky of her making—were made luminous by her, 

reflected on her words, were dazzled by what she saw. 

Others, blind to her light, heard only 

the cawing of the crows nested in their heads. 

The wise ones there knew all about the casting of shadows. 

Some had even traded in darkness—had forged troubled unions 

of dark and light. But they knew this Black star before them 

was Antares to their lurking Ares. In that moment they felt  

that this night’s moon, bathed in her corona, could make them 

brave enough to face what lurks in the penumbral places.

Dick Westheimer writes poetry to makes sense of the world—which is made easier by the company of his wife of 40 years, and the plot of land they’ve worked together for all of those years. His poems have appeared in Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, For a Better World, and Riparian.

MAKING TOMATO SAUCE WITH MY DAUGHTER

by Grant Clauser

So here we are, tucked into the house
with nothing but sighs to lengthen
and shorten the hours
while sickness stalks the season
like cracks in a sidewalk
children are taught to avoid.
We're listening to the kitchen radio
report number after number,
ten more dead in our county
as we stir tomatoes in a pot,
add basil, garlic, one glug
of wine and one of olive oil,
and slowly the house turns into
something other than a house
from mixing and stirring simple things—
pot of steaming pasta, breadsmell from the oven,
mingle like birdcall in the backyard
to help us forget our fear of news and neighbors
to become a kind of blessing we savor,
acting normal when the world is not.
It's a skill, I think, not the sauce, though
that too takes practice, but the mingling
we make of this. One life kneading another,
one day becomes the next, an hour
staring out the window becomes an afternoon
we soon forget. And we try to forget too
the money we've lost, the sunlight we're missing,
the ambulance pulling shadows down the road.
And now our old complaints get older
with disuse until they fade away, replaced
with new ones. And now the sauce is bubbling,
tongue tip on the wooden spoon says it's done.
Somehow we all sit down to dinner,
cross hands as we reach for bread.
The old dog under the table,
confused as always, still
rests his head on my knee.

Grant Clauser's fifth book Muddy Dragon on the Road to Heaven is forthcoming from Codhill Press. He's won the Cider Press Book Award and the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize. He works as an editor and teaches poetry at Rosemont College, and can be found on twitter at @uniambic. 

CORONA

by Dale Wisely

Daffodil corona by Nick Harris

                           1

Crown of stars

Corona

The rarefied gaseous envelope
          of stars, our sun

Unfathomable halo,
           obscured by the relentless
           blaze of plasma, hydrogen, and helium

Only a perfect eclipse—
          miracle of astronomic alignment—
          permits us a glimpse
          of the pearly glow
          flaring out from the black disk
          of the superimposed moon

                          2

Crown of thorns

We take care not to confuse
          illness with death,
          or melancholy with mourning

Now our sickness and our death
          seem inseparable and
          we are blind to the distinction

And in these days
          depression and grief
          run along parallel lines
          and converge on the horizon

          under a crown of flames
          under a crown of glory


                   3

Crown of flowers

Corona

Shaped like a cup or a trumpet,
     the flared center of the common daffodil

amaryllis     paperwhite    triandrus      narcissus  

a perennial: it flowers, dies—

but the gardener does not say it dies,
          she says it “dies back”

It is time to sort our sickness from our death

Die back and grow again another year

Author’s Note: Some of the language in part 1 is from the Google dictionary entry for “corona.” Howie Good contributed the “crown of …” phrases.

Dale Wisely runs Ambidextrous Bloodhound which publishes four journals: Right Hand Pointing, One Sentence Poems, Unbroken, and Unlost.  His chapbook Seven Stars is out in April 2020.