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WELCOME
to
The River Poets
Journal
Based in Lambertville, NJ
A Journal of Poetry/Prose
Art & Photography
River Poets Journal Spring Issue 2010 Selected Poems
To view full Journal - Go to Quarterly Journal/Links Page
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: June 21, 2010
Contact: Judith A. Lawrence
judithlawrence@comcast.net
Featured Artist - Judith A. Lawrence
Boys of Summer "Little Boy Blue Series " The Gardener
Portrait Paintings by Judith A. Lawrence
Judith A. Lawrence is a Bucks County, PA poet, artist whose work, including portraits, landscapes,
still life, and wood paintings on easels are exhibited and sold in Bucks County PA & Lambertville, NJ
Parable of the South Pole
In the kingdom of stones
on this planet I am a guest.
Though in exile
and never to return,
never to sleep by the Lake of Dreams,
I am treated well by glaciers.
As piebald basalt enduring
the winds of Antarctica,
I’ve become content
to exist on ice, in ice.
Cold is my element;
crystal my native tongue.
Stone is the hardest
of languages to learn,
but I will teach you
one sentence, and
when you pass it on,
having traveled to this antipode
to master this lesson,
having gone back to
those safe halls of science
where man is welcome,
you will remember me.
Like a phantom of
the night, like
my lunar mother lode,
I haunt.
I, asteroid, teach
one universal truth:
Do not say that the moon rises;
say instead that your Earth turns
beneath my home.
©Karla Linn Merrifield
After Walking the Dog
When we come home
we stare at one another,
roll on our secret carpets
and sniff the air for what
followed us back.
There are things we want
to dig up next time and others
we’ll take to bury. Each night
we sleep closer to our bones,
our names cooling at the end
of every claw.
© George Bishop
Farming Dandelions
She struts across the golden backyard,
a free range game hen.
She stoops to peck the ground,
scratching dirt with the tips of her rake,
cultivating blooms whose broad leaves
obscure the grass below with no apologies.
How she covets the compost piles of others,
their rain barrels and recycling bins.
Two doors down the neighbor drives
a Volvo fueled by vegetable oil.
One time it needed a jump and as
her husband’s pickup roared its rescue,
the irony was not lost on them.
The front and side of the house are his:
he marks his territory with f-350 tires
and piles of discarded railroad ties.
But this backyard belongs to her.
As scores of them flip their manes
to the sun she knows she has done her part.
The yield is good.
Her middle boy sowed these seeds.
That stem wilted in his sweaty palm
til his fingers opened up like petals
to reveal the gift. He made it hard for her
to kill the weeds and so she left
the lawn defenseless, like children
bringing dandelions to their mothers.
©Rebecca Taylor Fremo
Metamorphosis
December has stirred the poet’s wings.
in a sustained hallucination of skuas,
she’s flying off again to alien latitudes.
The migration of her feather-brained imagination
has begun: following a hollow-boned dream
to Antarctica where she welcomes seabirds plunge-diving
into her head amid bergy bits and brash ice crashing.
Not for the first time does she wing away,
but, this season, she flutters even farther south,
down where there are no limbs to alight on.
She soars not above treeline, but beyond it,
to the last great wilderness of her mind.
Remember last winter’s equatorial obsession
with the blue-footed boobies of the Galapagos?
This year, specter-like—disguised as a snowy petrel—
she expects to converse with penguins at the colder pole.
She’ll navigate phantasms of good-omening albatrosses;
she’ll witness ravished shag eggs, gutted gray sheathbill chicks.
That’s the reality when she goes to such glacial extremes
to be the White Continent’s alembic of avian belief.
©Karla Linn Merrifield
A Note to the Birds
A woman who loves to serve you every day
wants you to be merry.
Feel free to lark in the water
from rain-barrels. Visit her homemade
suet buffet as often as you like,
swoop to her gazebo in the garden
where at dawn with book, tea, and candles,
she welcomes your entertaining therapy.
Goldfinches, swerve from dappled spaces,
target her sunflowers of abundance.
Everyone dally with her gleams of kindness
and wild laughter. Bring your children,
distant cousins and strangers,
broadcast her magic presence like scandal.
© Bruce Lader
Dusk
I watch a cyclist
from under a forest canopy
gazing out into a deep meadow
in a reverie of thought
not searching for insight
paused in full breath
in realization of something impending
but not threatening
enveloping him with rapture
an idea still amorphous but in motion
We come out to the park at dusk
free of the day’s obligations
to breathe in the incoming night air
our hearts open to every greeting
though only connecting in a moment’s time
How are you now?
not before or after
Just now in the twilight’s breath
Shall we go down this hill
or across that field?
Wind past honeysuckle and wild rose?
Will owls glide along the tree line’s edge?
Is this the way to the boat launch
where we parked our cars?
Each choice made
flows in undulating step
right through to the sunset ride home
Anything can happen in a day dream
©Sandy Bender
Mother
A white tombstone inscribed ‘Mother’ and below, a metal box, fastened to the stone.
I leave to you the ashes from the hearth,
they are still warm to the touch, glowing.
I leave you the charged particles of wool dust,
from the spinning wheel they crackle against each other.
I leave the clipping of all your hair,
from your first haircuts, it is so fine and fair.
And the tooth of my favorite barn cat
a feather of particular brilliance
blue eggshells that I found once
when I was a girl and have kept all these years.
In this box:
the smell of milk
the sound of kneading bread
the shine of my best, Sunday shoes
a love letter written to me when I was your age by a man
that would not become my husband.
In this box;
a heart like the witch wants in the fairy story bleeding,
moving as if it still was needed
The heart beats out,
mother, mother, mother.
It has forgotten my Christian name.
©Megan Baxter
Opera of the Wood
The silence of the forest is not the silence of the empty classroom, the teacher bent over his desk grading papers, a book open to page 202, a soft breeze blowing through a crack in the window. It is not the city at 3 AM, a residential street, everyone asleep, the cat leaning into the grass to nap. The forest is the love song of the loons, the call of the killdeer, the sigh of a breeze passing through the leaves, the first fish surprised by a development of legs pushing itself out of the water into the tall grass where the crickets tell the temperature and the grasshoppers play in the leaf. The opera of the trees is just that grand, the wind that perfect, the harmony of the birds exactly right.
©Michael H. Brownstein
Sunset Reverie - Wood Painting
by Judith A. Lawrence
