How to Make Love in Dangerous Times

The Weeping Woman, Pablo Picasso

 

Thanks to editors Patrick Chapman and Dimitra Xidous for including my poem The Weeping Woman in this gorgeous issue of The Pickled Body . I love being part of this issue and some of the poems are stunning. Cover design is by featured artist Cara Dunne. You can read the magazine here

How to Make Love in Dangerous Times

 

The Wild Rose

The Wild Rose

Sometimes hidden from me
in daily custom and in trust,
so that I live by you unaware
as by the beating of my heart,

Suddenly you flare in my sight,
a wild rose looming at the edge
of thicket, grace and light
where yesterday was only shade,

and once again I am blessed, choosing
again what I chose before.

Wendell Berry

Clytie

 

The Sunflower Gustav Klimt

Posting an old poem of mine tonight that was published in Crannog 20. I saw a gorgeous image on Deviantart but course it must be copyrighted,  I settled on Klimt. I'm all about the yellow tonight for some reason.

Clytie

 

Days now I have looked

for my love a god in the sky

to feel the warmth

of divine nourishment.

 

My foot is always to the ground,

roots and tendrils cling

to my toes and wrap

their fingers around my ankle.

 

The wind of March is unkind,

Bears winter’s melted snow.

Ancestors go with Pluto,

retreat to their season.

 

The sun calls to the living.

I am the featureless face

of the stone; flat, smooth, clean.

I remember times.

 

To the ear of the wolf

is the call of the wild.

In the eclipsed moon

there is turmoil of birth.

 

Drinking earth’s blood

I am changed and continually

waking.

 

In my consciousness

the dream calls

and I am a flower maiden.

Hurt Hawks

Nighthawks Edward Hopper

Hurt Hawks

I

The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,
The wing trails like a banner in defeat,

No more to use the sky forever but live with famine
And pain a few days: cat nor coyote
Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons.


He stands under the oak-bush and waits
The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom
And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it.


He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.

The curs of the day come and torment him
At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head,

The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.

The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those
That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.


You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him;
Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;
Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him.


II

I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk;
but the great redtail
Had nothing left but unable misery
From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.


We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom,
He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death,
Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old
Implacable arrogance.


I gave him the lead gift in the twilight.

What fell was relaxed, Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what
Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising
Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.

Robinson Jeffers

Boulevard of Broken Dreams Gottfried Helnwein

Boyne Berries 20 Submission Call

 

 

Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,   

Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,

A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea

Somewhere at the end of it, heaving.

 

 ~ Sylvia Plath

The submission period for Boyne Berries 20 is now open and will close on Sunday 24th July at midnight. Boyne Berries 20 will feature poetry and fiction or prose on an open theme.

Send up to 3 poems per poetry submission. Poems should be no more than 40 lines long. Fiction and prose submissions should be no more than 1500 words. Please use Times New Roman 12 and single spacing. Please include a short biographical note. Submissions should be placed in the body of the email and attached as a word document attachment. Submit to orla.a.fay@gmail.com only.

 

Submissions which fail to adhere to the above criteria will be ignored.

 

The magazine will be published in late September 2016.

The Darling Buds of May

One more sonnet written and I'm a happy girl. And another poem just waiting for me to write it but I may be too tired tonight to shape it. But there's tomorrow and the June Bank Holiday weekend ahead so I'll catch you then time.

SONNET 18

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st;
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

William Shakespeare