I SEE TONIGHT

Earl J. Wilcox has been seeing days and nights poetically for The New Verse News for years and years.

MOURNING IN A PANDEMIC

by George Salamon

Protest on 23 April against the Trump administration’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters via The Guardian.

"Faced with an appalling US coronavirus death toll, the right denies the figures."

—The Guardian, May 15, 2020

After close to 90,000 in our land
Have been buried or burned, the
World remains as it is. You grasp
What is essential: They are dead.
Shunning theatrical shallowness or
Surrendering to the lure of eternity,
You seek earthly innocence.

George Salamon does his mourning in St. Louis, MO and most recently has contributed to The Asses of Parnassus, Dissident Voice, and TheNewVerse.News.

BLACK HOLE

by Sally Zakariya

Today (April 10), a global collaboration of more than 200 astronomers presented the first image of a directly-observed black hole. The picture of a glowing orange-yellow ring around a dark core, was compiled from observations by eight ground-based radio telescopes known collectively as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). —Live Science

Einstein dreamed them
far flung across the cosmos

Scientists to come had faith in them
believed in them, believed in the math
  that proved them

But until now only God could see them
their aura so bright a thousand suns blush
their pull so unimaginably great
their dark core so unfathomably deep
that to dare to submit to the immensity
to cross the impossible threshold
is to plunge to eternity


Sally Zakariya’s poetry has appeared in some 75 journals and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her most recent publication is the chapbook The Unknowable Mystery of Other People from The Poetry Box. She is also the author of Personal Astronomy, When You Escape, Insectomania, and Arithmetic and other verses, as well as the editor of a poetry anthology, Joys of the Table.

FOR LEONARD NIMOY

by William Cullen Jr.





On the day Spock died
some thought the world
became a better place
freed of one less voice of reason
the elemental powers rejoiced
but the Id of the universe
did not take part
knowing eternity’s too long a time
to wait for another
sparring partner.


William Cullen Jr. is a veteran and works at a non-profit in Brooklyn, NY. His poetry has appeared in Canary, Gulf Stream, Right Hand Pointing, Spillway, Word Riot and Written River: A Journal of Eco-Poetics.