Greetings!

Our website is dedicated to promoting the written word,
and abundant creativity in our Delaware Valley
community and globally.

Here you will find Poetry/Prose, Art and Photography
as well as updates on our meetings, contests and events. 
Add us to your favorites list and check back for updates.

Check our Submission Guidelines - Open Year Round


BottomBorder

WELCOME
to

The River Poets
Journal

Based in Lambertville, NJ

A Journal of Poetry/Prose
Art & Photography





































After Apples, Listening     

They have all gone now,
the fire engine-red Macintosh,
under batter with cinnamon,
gone to day school
on yellow buses
with brown-baggers,
or bruised to a freckled
taupe and plowed under
for ransom and ritual.

Some have had the life
crushed out of them
for Thanksgiving cup.

Standing on the stiff lawn
downwind of winter,
I drop the first cold
moon of November
into a fractured wheel
of apple limbs
and hear the bark
beg away.

A pine ridge,
thicker than a catcher’s mitt,
grabs half the wind
riding off Monadnock
and squeezes out
wrenching cries that hang,
like wounded pendants,
on necks
of far, thin stars.

Deep in the Earth,
in a thermal tube
of its own making,
an earthworm grows
toward a rainbow trout
sleeping under ice
and waiting to be heard,
or the last of an apple’s pips
still this side of the grass.

                                         ©Tom Sheehan





Coming and Going

Facing opposite directions,
swaying to the commuter train’s click clack,
are a gray-haired man in a gray suit
and a teenage boy with dyed-purple hair.
The voyagers sit face to face but not eye to eye.
The gray man's profiled face is wrinkled
and his crow’s-feet eyes are half open
as he slumps his head against the window,
while everything outside recedes from him,
but the purple-haired teen's eyes are wide
with his arms and legs in a restless fidget
as he seems to race toward everything beyond him.
Travelers on the same train,
one looking back, one looking forward.
                                     
                                            © Richard Fein



The Last Supper Date

on a one-way road
in the warm heart of Paradise
is a red light
where the road
dead ends

has no turns
or turnarounds
though the bulbs
bloom seasons of
green yellow red
and roadside roses
stir in breezes that once
were perfect angel breaths
with no borders to hold them in

I get out to pick the perfect one
but its petals blacken
into cold pieces of night
on which my teeth chatter
shatter at a sin-eater’s last meal 

from inside a closed flower shop
I hear God trying to hold it in

                                            ©Robert S. King



Fall  

how can world news be dire when                        
October lapis sky hides nothing
and butterflies flit in the botanic garden
where pumpkins’ brassy orange
perch atop hay bales

paths beckon deeper into wooded trails

acorn kerpops echo in a
faraway desert, where young men duck
to avoid fall, fall of bullets, fall of friends

I stumble amidst the park’s crunch

stoop to pick up a red leaf
blaze of blood-like brush
reminder of summer’s heat

now fallen

                                               © Joanne Faries



Autumn Offering

I shall be Autumn
this Halloween,
with leaf draped skirt,
and folds of
boysenberry velvet wine
flowing to the ground.

Brown stained face,
eyes rimmed in gold,
nails dripping sunset,
a crown of twigs
to cover my head.

You may gather from me
the spring of my youth,
my summer of maturity,
and hold onto
with me
the solace of
these days of remembering
before the frost.

                            © Judith A. Lawrence



Pinwheel Prediction

I am looking at New England posed in my photo album,
a white veil of fog lifting, the horizon blushing
with scarlet, amber, orange

while the pinwheels in my garden are squeaking,
spinning a death melody.
Their wimpy whines, woeful groans, pitiful songs
proclaim flowers are dying
and winter is crawling on the calendar.

But a fist full of butterscotch haired gaillardias,
white armed dusty millers, and begonias with rose fingers,
hang on, sing of hope, memories, wisdom—

we came from the earth and will return to it
one soft petal at a time
and morning will continue to drool on the grass,
wet the dead yellow blades with heavy spittle.

See how the fingers of autumn air comb
through the chinaberry tree;
last month it was a peacock—
branches feathered with fiery leaves;
today half of it looks puny, ill with change.

When winter’s cold skin covers it,
that tree will become a skeleton—
pale limbs suspended in gray air,
and you will walk on its fallen dead leaves,
forgetting about their former glory.

                                    © Loretta Diane Walker














River Poets Autumn 2009 Poetry Selections

Poems, Prose, Art/Photography by River Poets and Journal Contributors
All future rights to material published on this web site are retained
by the individual Authors and Artists/Photographers

Music by Sandy Bender
"Trinidad to Tobago"
This page was last updated: December 31, 2009
Sign InView Entries
Contact: Judith A. Lawrence
judithlawrence@comcast.net
Featured Photographer  - Richard Fein
Two Tykes Near Trees  -  Richard Fein
Red Umbrella  -  Richard Fein
Banjoman  -  Richard Fein
Balancemaster  -  Richard Fein
Fairgiant  -  Richard Fein
Mother and Child -  Richard Fein
Late Night Guitar

I hear an odd wire vibrate
against a dark red wood.

It ripples along, hoarse,
talks a mountain to pieces.

All Iberia is elaborate
in string and lath;

peninsula of high heels,
ribbons dancing on the mane,

black hats horse-parading,
friar’s lantern honing swords.

A later moon of Pico de Aneto
dies in the dust of olive trees.

A forlorn SAC bomber, tailed,
falcons its way home silently.

When a bull is born
the earth shakes twice,

and an odd wire vibrates
against a darker red wood.

                               ©Tom Sheehan
Rain

In my bottle of verse
all is quiet.  The wind
has stopped blowing on
main street, shuffled the
townspeople off of
the sidewalks.  Dogs
have stopped barking,
cats curled up in corners.

There are no more
words for color,
memory, thought,
you.  My feet are
up on the couch as
rain pelts the window,
trickles slowly down,
picking up droplets on
the way, like a bus
on the first day of school.                                     
                                    © Steve Shilling

Autumn

A chill in the air
last rose clinging on the vine
Fall waits in the wings

                    ©Judith A. Lawrence