MY FRIEND TEXTS

by Ron Riekki

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

“my typewriter is

tombstone”

—Charles Bukowski,

“8 count”

 

for S. and H.

 
            My friend texts:
 
It was great.  But today I
got a terrible news from
Ukraine. My best best
friend was killed by
Russian soldiers. So, all
my good memories
about graduating just
disappeared
 
I call her.  She says she
doesn’t want to talk.
I call her the next day,
she says she still doesn’t
want to talk.  I don’t know
how to write a poem
right now.  Another friend
calls.  She was a refugee
 
from Iraq.  Her house was
burned down there.  She
says it’s hard to talk about,
that forever she’s felt
silenced.  I feel the need to
write poetry.  I cannot handle
history.  I don’t know how
to cope other than through
 
poetry.  I had a meeting
recently where I talked
about what happened
to us in the military.
I told the woman
sitting in front of me
that I couldn’t talk
about it for decades
 
I’d get aphasia.  I
couldn’t speak.  I’d
want to speak, but I
couldn’t speak.  During
those decades, I wrote
poems.  Not enough
people read poems.
Poems sometimes
 
are the silenced
trying to speak
when their voice
is being choked,
when their words
are being taken
by history.
Like now.

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press).

NEXT MORNING TEXT TO A FRIEND

by Joanne De Simone Reynolds

Detail from “Morning Has Broken” (Oil and Acrylic on Canvas) by Brad Gray, 2017

I was despairing at 4 am—

 

I wrote the poem and sent it off . . .

 

I didn’t choose the illustration

 

Though I knew it was fitting a bit of a shock the bird a blue bird—something

 

Lifted—

 

My father didn’t serve in WWII

For freedom from dominance and division

For me to abandon the principle

 

The impulse—

 

That he passed away 22 years ago today on a Veterans Weekend is fitting—

 

What dawned in me this morning is what someone once called something like

 

Irregular reversal subversion—

 

What a morning like this one (not unlike the lines I wrote before these lines) calls forth or for

 

As if from a haunting (fathers poets birds)—

 

 

Joanne De Simone Reynolds is grateful to The New Verse News. This poem was written in response to her own poem published on the site on 11/9/2024. The words irregular, reversal, and subversion are taken from a letter William Carlos Williams wrote to Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry, in 1913.