A ROTTEN TIME

by Marge Piercy

After violent months of war

no one can win, men with

assault rifles doing what they

were built to do, kill many,

 

world burning, people dying

of heat, hurricanes stronger

more often, tornadoes

fiercer, drought scorching

 

land to desert, Animals,

trees dying off and gone,
let’s not just hope, pray

but work to leave an earth

 

we’re not guilty of spoiling.

Despair is just laziness.

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

Marge Piercy is the author of twenty one poetry collections and seventeen novels, including Woman at the Edge of Time, and SEX WARS. A lifelong feminist, socialist, and anti-war activist, her writing has been exploring labor, environmental justice, and the struggle for a more equitable world over the last five decades.

WINGS

by Tricia Knoll

This photo combo shows Katie Posten holding the front and back of a photograph she found stuck to her car's windshield on Dec. 11 in New Albany, Ind. The photo is from a tornado-damaged home in Kentucky that landed almost 130 miles away in Indiana. The photograph was among dozens of personal items to turn up far from home in the aftermath of the tornadoes that sowed a path of destruction across six states. Photographs, by far, were the most common find. In major storms, they’re often carried the furthest, said John Knox, an associate professor of geography at the University of Georgia. “They’re like little wings when they go up into the air,” he said. (AP via The Washington Post, December 12, 2021)

I archive my family’s wings

    letters Union soldier William Lewis wrote home during the Civil War

    my grandmother’s photo holding my squirming mother

    my mother in her fancy hat leaning against my dad’s black Buick

    my mother rocking my newborn daughter

    my daughter holding her newborn

 I have no idea where they go next. 

 

I cannot forget    

    I found the photo of an altar boy wearing a halo

    and a white gown in a driveway in the Ninth Ward

    in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. 

I never knew whose angel he was. 

 

What hurricane wind tears apart

    flies, lives that shift from black and white

    to battered color. Wings beating birds 

    to refuge on a windshield,

    a mud puddle. Stuck in the twig

    of a naked sycamore. 

 

Angel memories try to find

    a way home. I believe

    the only thing my mother feared

    was the hurricanes in Florida. 

    I have no pictures of her fear.

Author's note: I am the archivist of most of the Civil War memorabilia of my great-grandfather William Lewis who served in an Indiana regiment. I never heard back from the historical societies in Indiana when I offered them the 65 letters he and his friends wrote to my great grandmother. Some of what he said is included in my book of poetry How I Learned to Be White.

Tricia Knoll lives in Vermont which catches the tail end of most weather systems that flow from west to east. Her poetry appears widely in journals, anthologies and five collections. Most recent is Checkered Mates, a chapbook out from Kelsay Books. Her next collection entitled Let's Hear It for the Horses—love song poems to horses—is on pre-sale discount from The Poetry Box publishing house through December 31 for its release on February 1. 

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD KENTUCKY HOMES

by M. N. O'Brien

In an interview Sunday morning on CNN’s “State of the Union,” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said the agency is preparing for severe weather events of similar magnitude. “This is going to be our new normal, and the effects that we’re seeing from climate change are the crisis of our generation,” she said. —The Washington Post, December 13, 2021

Echoes of memories: the crunching gravel

under departing tire trucks drowned out

by a howling freight train. Gnashing

through the house, using its churning debris,

corpses of livelihoods to kill more. Leaving

only the warm December stones behind.

In the distance, coal is exhumed

with Kentucky's unbridled spirit.

M. N. O'Brien received his B.A. from Roanoke College, where his work was published in On Concept's Edge and received the Charles C. Wise Poetry Award. His work has appeared in SOFTBLOW, Right Hand Pointing, and The Ekphrasis Review. He currently lives in Christiansburg, Virginia, taking seasonal jobs that do not interfere with writing poetry. He despises writing about himself in the third person.