DIVING DUCKS ON NEW YEAR’S DAY

by Melanie Choukas-Bradley 

Art by Doug Pifer for The WV Independent Observer

Lithe buffleheads and mergansers
Newly down from Canada
Tandem dive into the rough blue Potomac
 
Wind whips the sycamores
Causing their spheres of seeds to
Dance as clouds race above
 
Next week Jimmy Carter will lie in state
And then Donald Trump returns
 
Today ducks are diving
Let’s just watch them dive

 
Melanie Choukas-Bradley is a Washington, DC naturalist and award-winning author of eight nature books, including Wild Walking—A Guide to Forest Bathing Through the Seasons, City of Trees, A Year in Rock Creek Park, and Finding Solace at Theodore Roosevelt Island. She has had several previous poems published in the The New Verse News and many poems published by Beate Sigriddaughter’s Writing in a Woman’s Voice, including four that have won “Moon Prizes.” Her poetry has also been featured on nature-oriented websites.

SCENES FROM A CHALICE OF WATERS/VICTORY

by Dick Altman

Through “Field Work,” farmers and ranchers in rural parts of Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, and Wyoming were eligible for up to $10,000 to implement creative water projects on their land (think: improved water efficiency, water reliability, water quality, crop yield or crop diversification, and labor efficiency). Nearly 80 producers applied and 12 projects were selected this year, totaling more than $95,000 of investment into research led by farmers and ranchers. These folks are the experimenters, tinkerers, innovators, and iterators who—while Western states agonize over how to resolve antiquated water compacts—have been finding ways to eke out a living from the land. They’re people who have a vested interest in finding ways to use water more effectively—for their own operations and for the good of the West. —LOR Foundation

Southern Colorado

While born a stream,
you gave way to a dam,
then a lake swimming
with impressionistic clouds,
clouds coalescing above me,
clouds inscribed with geese,
I watch scout  
for new nesting grounds
your rush-plated periphery.
 
While a thousand feet below,
a pair of herons,
as I approach,
loft pterodactyl-like wings,
to seek another cove,
while a lone seagull,
a thousand miles
from ocean’s home,
alights
on your boulder-strewn shore,
to fill their void.
 
While a horned-toad,
no bigger than my thumb,
streaks across the path,
to escape
my cleated feet,
as a swallowtail
samples fresh crowns
of Chamisa,
into whose stems
the pebbled form
disappears.
 
While in the water,
trout eye me warily,
before finning
into shadows
and out of sight—
but not beyond
eyes of the bald eagle,
whose outstretched talons
I last see loft
a limp figure that broke,
in death,
the surface,
to snatch
a damsel fly
emergent.
 
While my eyes shift
to observe you,
barefooted,
clamber over rocks
defending the shore,
a route I fear to test.
 
While you look,
from above,
as if queen of waves,
standing amid formations,
submerged,
whose gray elongations,
boulders immobile
of another age,
evoke a pod of whales,
newly calved,
in waters
of imagination.
  
While above you.
beyond vermillion cliffs,
ascend the Silver peaks,
whose walls
of white-enameled concavity
return to our eyes
sun’s luminescence,
as from facets
of cloud-high broken glass.
 
While wind’s pulse unfurls
in a tidal whisper
against the shore,
I’m reminded
of decades’ voices
alloyed to conjure
a mountain valley, 
untrammeled,
into a victory chalice,
embracing a lake
called Nighthorse—
final scene in a dream
to solace warring thirsts,
farm or factory,
Ute Indian or not,
whose perfected comity
our spirits bow to
each time
we tread its rim.

Dick Altman writes in the high, thin, magical air of Santa Fe, NM, where, at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. He is published in Santa Fe Literary Review, American Journal of Poetry, riverSedge, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Blue Line, THE Magazine, Humana obscura, The Offbeat, Haunted Waters Press, Split Rock Review, The RavensPerch, Beyond Words, The New Verse News, Sky Island Journal, and others here and abroad. A poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has in progress two collections of some 100 published poems. His work appears in the first volume of The New Mexico Anthology of Poetry published this year by the New Mexico Museum Press. 

ANOTHER NEW YEAR'S EVE

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

A flock of migrating Canada geese take flight from Colorado in 2014. Credit: Amanda Sutherland, Reporter-Herald.

On a chilly December afternoon
A paper-white gibbous moon
Hauls itself over the eastern hills
Up through the seasonal haze
Into a sky crowded with pale, nondescript clouds
Shuffling between horizons.
A single winter sparrow pecks for seeds
On the ground beneath the grape arbor.
We open the doors and windows
To the cold air
And not without trepidation
Face those far hills
Where the new year will first reveal itself.
The future has twisted out of our grasp
And belongs now
To our children and grandchildren
To whom we must apologize
For leaving them to struggle
Against the tempests we might have prevented
But did not.
We cannot know if they will succeed or fail,
Cannot know if migrating geese and cranes and swans
Will someday not return
To the ponds and marshes
Where they have wintered for ten thousand thousand years,
Cannot know if the Great Mother
Will finally disown, disinherit and evict all her offspring,
The righteous and the not,
While this infinitesimal blue bubble once called Home
Goes on wobbling and spinning
Through the oceanic darkness
Of the undivided now.


Buff Whitman-Bradley's poems have appeared in many print and online journals. His most recent books are To Get Our Bearings in this Wheeling World and Cancer Cantata. With his wife Cynthia, he produced the award-winning documentary film Outside In and, with the MIRC film collective, made the film Por Que Venimos. His interviews with soldiers refusing to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan were made into the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. He lives in northern California.

PLEDGING ALLEGIANCE

by Thomas R. Smith

Late afternoon sun on snow. Intense
flare concentrated in the west, skimming
cold shadows pooling below the dam.
On the path I stop a moment to commiserate
with a friend, both of us scalded by
the daily piss shower out of the White House.
Still January and the open river
hosts hundreds of ducks, geese, and swans. The new
EPA head listens to oil and coal
companies but not the community
of beings. I see my neighbors the water-
birds almost every day. I must owe them
something. Does money and power have
the right to disregard their fate? Ryan
and Pence stand smirking behind T***p while
the lit fuse sparks past their ankles.
Do they really believe that only
the President will be burned? Things can
get corrupted so inconspicuously—
a file, water, air, democracy—that we often
notice only when the screen’s gone blank.
The body politic knows it’s infected,
will the immune system mobilize?
The purveyors of “alternate facts” tried to
smear Rachel Carson too.  Heroically
she saved us from ourselves. Do we have it
in us to save us from ourselves this time?
I look out past the fliers and swimmers
at home on the river, toward the sun’s
setting splendor.  Our twilight will be
uglier, like the men at the top. To them
say, Earth first! You can’t be my government
if you won’t be the government of the geese.


Thomas R. Smith has had hundreds of poems published on three continents.  In the United States, his poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.  His poems were included in Editor's Choice II (The Spirit That Moves Us Press), a selection of the best of the American small press, and in The Best American Poetry 1999 (Scribner).  His work has reached wide national audiences on Garrison Keillor's public radio show Writer's Almanac and former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser's syndicated newspaper column, American Life in Poetry. His most recent book of poems is The Glory from Red Dragonfly Press.

THE SOMETIMES LAKE

by Laura Rodley

Image source: The Heart of New England

Low in the pasture slings a wide clear lake,
winds rippling its surface without a break.
Wide and wider still each day it grows
fed by the runoff of fast melting snow,
so wide today whole pasture is sheer green
from water with slivers of icy sheen,
tall white birch and pine reflected, the sky
and all its clouds, rippling, three feet high.
The Sometimes Lake stands, it legs quickly moving,
mallards land, peddle round, flick tails, grooving.
No herons yet, no tiny frogs, just ducks
and Canadian Geese  who press their luck
landing where other times they’d have to duck
no farmers treasure they, wings tightly tucked.


Laura Rodley’s New Verse News poem “Resurrection” appears in The Pushcart Prlze XXXVII: Best of the Small Presses (2013 edition). She was nominated twice before for the Prize as well as for Best of the Net. Her chapbook Rappelling Blue Light, a Mass Book Award nominee,  won honorable mention for the New England Poetry Society Jean Pedrick Award. Her second chapbook Your Left Front Wheel is Coming Loose was also nominated for a Mass Book Award and a L.L.Winship/Penn New England Award. Both were published by Finishing Line Press.  Co-curator of the Collected Poets Series, she teaches creative writing and works as contributing writer and photographer for the Daily Hampshire Gazette.  She edited As You Write It, A Franklin County Anthology, Volume I and Volume II.