TREES IN SPRING

by Royal Rhodes

David Hockney, who died on Friday, painting in Normandy in 2020. Photograph: David Hockney in The Guardian

Hockney shaped the Lockdown into art --
an old half-timbered house in Normandy,
and made a cider-press his studio.
The synchronized, rich colors that we see
in pallid light with white tonality
in fruit trees and a pinkish sky take part
with summer greens around a bright blue pond.
"My little Bayeux tapestry, " he called
these scenes of painted whorls and arabesques.
Reflections show reality exists
in splashing drops of rain and morning mists,
as wind and moving boughs create a bond,
even if no breath of wind is felt.
One storm can set the blossom's wind-blown fates,
transforming how we viewers see ourselves.
A world we know intensifies, inflates
the voices of laments each throat creates.
We see a light that helps the winter melt,
as trees pass nutrients from heart to heart.
The openness of strokes has moved his brush
in twisting marks appearing in the hundreds,
a deft illusion of the real we rush
to feel before Corona comes to crush
us just as hoped-for Spring can truly start.

Royal Rhodes is a poet whose poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, including several times in The New Verse News. 

AMERICAN FLAG BLUE

by Bonnie Proudfoot

In the twilight of my life, I came 

to the history of indigo: color 

and currency, “a length of cloth 

in exchange for one human body.” 

The secrets to its cultivation known 

by Africans. “In the 1700’s profits 

outpaced those of sugar and cotton.” 

The first American flag stitched with 

indigo-dyed cloth. Wave a flag sewn 

by shackled fingers while the blue 

bruise thickens, seeps its way into today, 

stain of the past slumps in the corner 

of every classroom, pain threaded into 

every pledge, each anthem we sing. 

Now, 250 more years around the sun,

we’re waiting for the arc of the moral

universe to catch the freedom train,

but the station is empty, streetlights

have begun to fail, first one, then another, 

shadows lengthening while our ears

press the rails, listening for the thrum.

My country tis of thee, sweet land—

it’s twilight here in the heartland.

the indigo light dims and lingers.

 

 

Author’s note: Source of the poem’s quotations: Indigo: In Search of the Color that Seduced the World by Catherine McKinley.

Bonnie Proudfoot's fiction, poetry, reviews, and essays have appeared in anthologies and journals, including Sheila-Na-Gig, SWWIM, Gyroscope Review, Rattle, The New Verse News, and the New Ohio Review, and have been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart. Her novel Goshen Road(OU/ Swallow) received the WCONA Book of the Year and was long-listed for the PEN/ Hemingway. Poetry books include Household Gods, a chapbook, on Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, and Incomer, released in 2026 on Shadelandhouse Modern Press.

HOPE FOR THE NEW YEAR

by Barbara Schweitzer

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

There is no rodeo feat to lift history.

History is the slain bull bloodied for sport 

with his blood scoured into the concrete.

 

It is obscene to pick up a pen

on the day disaster flies in

but if not, the next day and the next 

days will keep us dumb to our ways.

 

We have physics and light: we know 

dark cannot exist when filled with light,

that speaking corrals our common plights

and even pigeons know how to take flight

and we are not night. We will not be night.

Barbara Schweitzer writes poems and plays and sundry fiction from upstate RI. She is the author of 33 1/3: Soap Opera Sonnets. She is the creator of Cyjoe Barker, detective extraordinaire of stage and flash fiction. Feeling Plankton, a 10-minute play can still be viewed in its entirety here.

TURNING POINT

Jan Chronister is a retired educator who splits her year between the extremes of northern Wisconsin (by Lake Superior) and southern Georgia. She has authored three full-length poetry collections and twelve chapbooks. Jan edits and publishes the work of fellow poets under the imprint of Poetry Harbor.

HANUKKAH

by Anita S. Pulier

Sure, we know the story.

Desecration of a temple,

hopelessness, sorrow.

Short on sanctified oil

the fire and light on hand

turn out to be good enough,

darkness is defeated.

And isn’t that the point?

Things are never perfect,

never, and “good enough”

is the miracle.

As each of our children

comes into their own,

defying myth and dogma,

they create for us, the

generation of overseers,

a unique spectrum in which

to pause, inhale the holiday,

embrace imperfection

redefine terms, witness

history in the making.

Anita's latest book is Leaving Brooklyn (Kelsay Books). Anita’s poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies. She has been a featured poet on The Writer's Almanac and Cultural Daily. 

THE POET PROVOKED

by Roberta Batorsky

These verses searchlight wrongs,
thrust into the light
all injustice lurking in the shadows.

Stanzas pry loose prison bars,
insights scorch wrong-doers,
violators of decency

No place for you to hide as
my couplets cauterize you.
These devices are unsparing
instruments of revenge.

Haikus hunt you
Elegies eviscerate
Ballads batter 
And meter mauls you.

My lyrics bear the sting 
of sincerity,
passing merciless
judgment in rhyme.

 

This poet for hire.

Roberta Batorsky, a New Jersey poet, has published this month her first book of poetry, Perihelion.

LAMENT FOR THE TIMES

by Ann Grogan

after George Eliot, “The Choir Invisible” and William Henry Channing, “My Symphony”

Primitives by Kathy

George Eliot prayed that she reach
the purest heaven;
be the cup of strength to those in agony.
I cannot seem to save myself.

I pray only to survive while
grasping at the crumbling edges 
of a giant hole into which I fall.
I cannot seem to save myself.

I try to smile, try to join in,
feed pure love, ignore the vile,
turn the world back to being kind.
I cannot seem to find the time.

What sweet luxury Channing had,
to advise we “bear all cheerfully… 
await occasions, hurry never.”
I cannot seem to find the time.

I don’t want to live in a world
where immigrants are not respected
or given dignity. 
And yet it seems I do.

I don’t want to live in a world
where women bleed out in cars because
craven doctors betray oaths to care for us.
And yet it seems I do.

Better Buddhist than bleary-eyed,
refusing the light that drives me on
to cry for help as we drown.
I cannot seem to find the light.

I try the common, I try the quiet,
I try to listen then to sing,
but stars refuse to shine on me.
I cannot seem to find the light.

Ann Grogan is a joyful octogenarian, retired lawyer, and emerging poet who lives in San Francisco, CA. Her writing promotes the unequivocal permission to pursue one’s passions at any age. Her poems have appeared in Little Old Lady, The Prairie Review, Querencia, the University of Vermont’s Continuing Education Newsletter, and on KAWL Public Media “Bay Poets”, and is forthcoming in Amethyst Review. She’s the author of two volumes of poetry, Poetic Musings on Pianos, Music & Life. Her music and poetry website is rhapsodydmb.com.

SOLIDARITY

by Melissa Balmain

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

“If you’ve noticed more fireflies dancing across your backyard this summer, you’re not imagining things. Experts report that 2025 has been a banner year for these glowing insects.”—WTOP News

Even my ordinarily blank lawn
is flashing this July—no bottle rocket
or Catherine wheel could match the pleasant shock it
gives me each time a tiny lamp turns on
to help a bachelor find a blinding date. 
The bugs can’t read, of course, about pollution
and other woes that might spell dissolution
for all their kind, but as they mate and mate
I like to think they somehow know what’s looming,
deep in their chitin—that their sudden blooming
is nature’s way of putting up a fight,
and that these living fireworks before us
can make us hear, and heed, a timely chorus:
When darkness threatens you, crank up your light.

Melissa Balmain edits Light, America's longest-running journal of comic verse. Her latest book of poetry is Satan Talks to His Therapist (Paul Dry Books).

PAGES OF LIGHT (IN DARK TIMES)

by David Chorlton

(1)

Hard to tell

whether the wind 

last night was social unrest

or coyotes’ dreams as darkness flowing.

The lightness of touch suggested

nature whispering

                                 in the face of human discord

yet in the absence of a moon

and with so few stars

to give direction there were only the neighborhood palms

leaning on the moment

                                            as if time

had taken solid form and claimed

the desert underneath

the city as its first

and only home.

 

(2)

Stone-bright the way ahead

runs true to course, rising by the step

to a view of all things possible

and some

                 forever out of reach. All those things

that never change come what may

are out there, stubborn and holding their ground

through traffic jams and newscasts,

analyses and polls, discussions

that take truth

                           away just as the sun

has stripped first the outer skin

of the saguaro lying

where it fell two summers back

                                                            and subsequently

dried its flesh revealing the core

connecting tip to root, the inner life

revealed in code, an alphabet

surviving after language ends.

(3)

The peaks and dips along the ridge

rest easily this morning

against clouds too closely packed

for news to pass

                               from worlds beyond our own. 

Grey light, pigeon feathers

scattering from the rooftop cooling unit at house

four-three-four-seven

where a hawk endures a mockingbird’s attention

until he stretches out

                                        and eases into day’s grey light.

Nothing exists outside

his range of vision, he’s the headline and the story

circling higher than opinion columns

reach. Doesn’t need words

to know what he knows. Leaves emptiness alone

because the entire sky

                                          isn’t worth

the area he’s taken for a home.

 

(4)

A bright and tranquil morning

on the way around the pond where red-

eared sliders and secrets

move just beneath the sky

that floats across the surface to the reeds

at the farthest edge.

                                      A Black phoebe picks flies

and rumors from the air.

None are too fast for him,

neither the latest out of Hollywood

nor royalty’s ongoing

struggle to be important. What is true tastes no different

from what is not; he keeps dipping

and swerving

                         through politics, finance

and all the way down

to the feathers and bones left on the ground

still with a glaze of moonlight.

 

(5)

Arroyo walk, sidestepping the facts and

speculating whether

the boulder resting on the slope just past

where the trail dips came

to be exactly in position after

falling through space

                                        or was coughed out of the Earth.

Some facts are immoveable, too heavy

to be argued about. But someone’s always

naming parts, allocating

numbers, holding science

to the light and insisting explanations

matter more

                       than the experience

of stopping every time

to contemplate the mystery

that built the world before there was

a truth

             to lie about, when

only the stars kept records. 

 

(6)

Darkness left, light straight

ahead, the first sky of the day can’t decide

which mood to promise. The clouds

are carrying concealed, the sun’s

a lonely heart just waking up. 

One day looks

                          much like another, give or take

the shadows and the low high

in the forecast, rain

this afternoon on a street

for all weathers where showers dance

on asphalt,

                    heat soaks in

and wishes for a better world

go barefoot, once around the cul-de-sac

and back, beyond the visible, beyond

reality, beyond what even

                                                 the hawk can see

from his throne of wind.

David Chorlton lives in Phoenix with a view of a desert mountain and more interesting local bird life than many people expect in a city. The desert still teaches him about poetry in a way academies can never do.

PROJECT 2025

by Janet Blair

Call me crotchety and loud
ineffective and utopian 
unrealistic and wasteful.

Laugh as I hold postered signs 
made with markers and glitter 
waving them at street corners downtown 
chanting about democracy 
calling out to the cars honking in agreement.

Roll your eyes.
Say it will not make one iota of difference.
We are awash in red here, completely surrounded. 

As the blood seeps in,

words are banned and bodies under lock.

They machete through decades of progress
rewrite dictionaries and craft spells to spoon feed 
the dozing people around us.  

Still, I will stomp
call out to the moon and paint my face 
bottling up today's screams 
to send floating toward the future

never choosing silence or submission. 

You see, I was trained for this shit early on—
learned how to cradle a cry inside when the belt lashed
how to hold my head up the next day 
and look a tyrant straight in the eye

how to march through the 

shredded gift-wrapping paper

and blooming bluish bruises 
toward an exit sign 
at the end of a long, long hallway of years. 

I know how to crawl 
                                toward the light... 

Janet Blair lives and works in the Tampa Bay area. Currently, she is a weekend poet who dreams of writing full time. Her most recent work can be found in South Florida Poetry Journal (SoFloPoJo), The Florida Bards Anthology and The Eckerd Review.