Robin Helweg-Larsen's Blog, page 17
January 10, 2025
Sonnet variation: J.D. Smith, ‘Lullaby for the Bereaved’
Your hours of tears won’t let you follow
Those who’ve left you alone.
Tonight your head lies on a pillow,
Not beneath earth and stone.
The dead won’t be returning,
Not for all of your pleas,
Not for all your candles burning.
Get up off your knees.
The deceased, removed from their rest
Can take up all your hours
Until your mind, denied a fair rest,
Is deprived of its powers.
The road set before you is rocky and steep,
So seize the night’s respite and drift off to sleep.
*****
J.D. Smith writes: “Though I do not sing, play an instrument or read music, I had Brahms’ Lullaby in the back of my mind while attempting to deal with various losses, and the poem roughly follows its tune. In adjusting to a new reality (I hesitate to say “move on” or “get over,” phrases that smack of empathic failure), sometimes all one can do is rest.”
J.D. Smith has published six books of poetry, most recently the light verse collection Catalogs for Food Lovers, and he has received a Fellowship in Poetry from the United States National Endowment for the Arts. This poem is from The Killing Tree (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Smith’s first fiction collection, Transit, was published in December 2022. His other books include the essay collection Dowsing and Science, and his seventh collection, The Place That Is Coming to Us, will be published by Broadstone Books in 2025. Smith works in Washington, DC, where he lives with his wife Paula Van Lare and their rescue animals.
X: @Smitroverse
Photo: “Grief” by That One Chick Mary is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
January 8, 2025
Short poem: Richard Fleming, ‘Now’
The future’s inconceivable.
The past is irretrievable.
So all we have is now: that’s it,
yet half the time we miss that bit.
*****
Richard Fleming writes: “Four short lines, two rhyming couplets, succinct, hopefully not preachy, just something that we need to take to heart and not forget.”
Richard Fleming is an Irish-born poet (and humorist) currently living in Guernsey, a small island midway between Britain and France. His work has appeared in various magazines, most recently Snakeskin, Bewildering Stories, Lighten Up Online, the Taj Mahal Review and the Potcake Chapbook ‘Lost Love’, and has been broadcast on BBC radio. He has performed at several literary festivals and his latest collection of verse, Stone Witness, features the titular poem commissioned by the BBC for National Poetry Day. He writes in various genres and can be found at www.redhandwriter.blogspot.com or Facebook https://www.facebook.com/richard.fleming.92102564/
Photo from Richard Fleming
January 6, 2025
Nonce form: Aaron Poochigian, ‘Reunion Show’
Remember rage the way we used to love it
and what mad masks we wore when we began.
Think of the shrieking eagle on our van,
the decal, with its wings aflame
and our prophetic name,
The Downward Spiral,
the viral
expansion of it,
the perks and packed arenas
before the groupies got between us,
the label dropped us, and the fad wound down.
Boys, since this bar is in a nowhere town
let’s pound out, with our amps cranked up to ten,
sincerer tribute to the angry art
than we could handle at our start.
The blasphemy we hurled
against the world
back then
was out of season.
Now we have damned good reason
to smash things up like ruined men,
and all my lyrics will be from the heart.
*****
Aaron Poochigian writes: “I played in punk bands in high school and college and wrote that poem after I had gone all-in on poetry. I imagined what it would be like to get back together with my former band-mates at a later age. ‘Reunion Show’ is one of the first poems in which I let the nonce form discover itself with various line lengths and rhyme scheme. I tried to just let it all come together. Here is another later one like that: https://newcriterion.com/article/happy-birthday-herod/“
‘Reunion Show’ was first published in The Dark Horse.
Aaron Poochigian earned a PhD in Classics from the University of Minnesota and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. His latest poetry collection, American Divine, the winner of the Richard Wilbur Award, came out in 2021. He has published numerous translations with Penguin Classics and W.W. Norton. His work has appeared in such publications as Best American Poetry, The Paris Review and Poetry.
aaronpoochigian.com
americandivine.net
Twitter: @Poochigian
Facebook: Aaron Poochigian
Instagram: aaronpoochigian
Photo: “Saxon Blondie 08.03.2019 Fotografías para iRock ______________ #multienfoque #picoftheday #photography #photo #photographer #photooftheday #nofilter #sinfiltro #instapic #instacool #wacken #woa #rock #show #alemania #festival #metal #rock #saxon #nibb” by ISENGARD is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
January 4, 2025
Sonnet: Jenna Le, ‘Guilty Pleasures’
Half of my favorite works of fanfiction
are stories that anesthetize the pain
produced by the original’s depiction
of harsh events: the person whom the main
character loved who met a tragic end
is resurrected in the fan-made sequel;
the star-crossed couple gets a chance to mend,
and consummate, a bond that has no equal.
The other half are stories that prolong
the pain and also boost its magnitude
deliciously until my nerves all tingle:
near-misses multiply, and roadblocks throng;
epiphanies loom close yet still elude;
misunderstandings keep our heroes single.
*****
Jenna Le writes: “I believe there’s been a fair amount of published scholarship in recent years about fanfiction and fanfiction culture. I admit I’m not up-to-date on any of it, really, and am only really conversant with such aspects of it as I have personally chanced to encounter. I can only say there seems to have been recent movement toward increased legitimization of the field: in 2019, one of the prestigious Hugo Awards for speculative fiction was awarded to a body of fan-work/transformational work, for instance. Just as for other flavors of fiction, there are probably infinitely many ways to classify and subclassify fanfiction. Novelist Naomi Novik‘s work and interviews are maybe a good place to start looking, for people curious to learn more.”
Jenna Le (jennalewriting.com) is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011), A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2017), and Manatee Lagoon (Acre Books, 2022), https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/M/bo185843950.html The sonnet ‘Guilty Pleasures’ was first published in Snakeskin.
Photo: “guilty pleasure” by ohmann alianne is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
January 3, 2025
Barbara Loots, ‘Love Song’
You are the butterfly whose wings
stir up a rainfall in Peru.
The tropic fern unfurled that brings
an earthquake in Tibet is you.
The cry bursting from blackbirds’ throats
that turns the tide on Iceland’s shore
is you, and Sahara’s dusty motes
rosing the sunset in Lahore.
Who is the breath of an infant’s sigh
that sparks the heart of a unicorn?
The rock streaking the moonless sky
that wafts a feather around Cape Horn?
You, the invisible silver thread
between Zanzibar and Amsterdam.
Even by thought unlimited,
whatever the you may be, I am.
*****
Barbara Loots writes: “On my way to copy out the poem I meant to send you, I ran across this one. It has appeared only once in print, so I decided to give it another chance at immortality. Love is too small a word to contain the energy field of creation, evolution, and eternity. But this little verse (published in my second collection Windshift, from Kelsay Books, 2018) helps connect me with ‘whatever the you may be‘ right here and now.”
Barbara Loots resides with her husband, Bill Dickinson, and their boss Bob the Cat in the historic Hyde Park neighborhood of Kansas City, Missouri. Her poems have appeared in literary magazines, anthologies, and textbooks since the 1970s. She is a frequent contributor to lightpoetrymagazine.com. Her three collections are Road Trip (2014), Windshift (2018), and The Beekeeper and other love poems (2020), at Kelsay Books or Amazon. More bio and blog at barbaraloots.com
Photo: “September 1st 2008 – They’re Back” by Stephen Poff is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
January 1, 2025
Happy 2025… RHL, ‘The Sun is Always Setting’
The sun is always setting, always setting on your day;
you sense the dark approaching, wish that it would stay away.
Do you want a life unchanging? Wish to still be a newborn?
Don’t you know life’s not a rosebud, but has root and leaf and thorn?
The sun is always setting and the black drapes are unfurled;
but notice that the sun sets on your world, not on the world:
it’s rolling into brightness in another’s happy land,
and the dark is evanescent and the brightening is grand.
The sun is always setting on the dinosaurs, but birds
are flocking into being, as are Serengeti herds;
and the sun that lights humanity? Of course it’s going to set,
and elsewhere light new tales of which we’ll just be a vignette.
The sun is always setting, but that view is just your choice;
I say the world is turning and evolving; I rejoice.
*****
The winter solstice and the turning of the calendar drive a feeling of sunset that I can’t shake. I may be fit, still climbing trees and running on beaches, but at 74 there is both an awareness of gradual decline and a recognition that you can only hope for another 20 years with a fair amount of luck. “And of my three score years and ten, / None of them will come again…” as it were. That’s the personal bit.
Add to that the strongest country in (and quondam leader of) the world, breaking everything into pieces and throwing them all up in the air with no idea of how anything will land and what will be broken; taking all branches of the federal government (including unfortunately the Supreme Court) and those of half the states and just piling them up for a bonfire.
Add the possibility of runaway AI (such as concerns Harari) being jumpstarted by the Luciferic billionaire firestarter… and it feels like the End of the World.
But let’s be reasonable: it always feels like the end of the world, at least to those no longer in their youth. Because it is, for them. (For us. For me.) Jesus saying the end of the world would come within that generation… Last Days prophecies bubbling up in all religions… Preppers expecting nuclear war, ethnic uprising, climate catastrophe overnight… Doomsday is always imminent, and yet things keep going; just not as before… This is the End of the World as we know it, but will not be as we expected it. (And always the unfortunate eternal evils, regardless of era: Israelis committing genocide on Palestinians since the days of Deuteronomy, and so on.)
I swear there is a highly ambivalent poem in there somewhere, but I haven’t dug it out yet. But hey… Happy 2025!
Photo: Keith McInnes | City of Sydney
December 30, 2024
Unrhymed sonnet: Peggy Landsman, ‘Shortly Before Another Winter Solstice in South Florida’
The seasons flow from much too hot to warm;
the moon balloons from farther south to north.
I struggle with myself to catch sunrise;
I shiver at sunset as darkness dawns.
Two clouds drift by in stillness as in dream.
My mind makes small confessions in the dark.
I wander through this ordinary night
discovering new doubts about myself.
The weather of my moods, not too extreme;
the climate of my life in crisis blooms.
The winter days grow short; my life, too long.
My understanding pales beneath the moon.
We creatures who’ve evolved to change the world
have not evolved enough to change ourselves.
*****
Peggy Landsman writes: “It did take me quite a while to make the transition from Berkeley, California, but now, after twenty-one years in South Florida, I’m finally over my culture shock.
I love walking on the beach and swimming in the ocean when the water temperature is at least 80°. I love the birds I see more of here than in other places: ibises, egrets, herons, ospreys, pelicans, etc. And I get all the culture I need for free from my local public county library. If they don’t have a movie, cd, or book on their shelves, they order it through ILL (inter-library loan).
I spend most of my time writing and hanging out with my favorite other person. What more could any septuagenarian poet want?
Also: The poem was first published under the slightly shorter title “Before Another Winter Solstice in South Florida” in the Winter 2024 issue of The Orchards Poetry Journal. And, by the way, that’s a very friendly journal for formal poetry. Thanks, Karen and Jenna!”
Peggy Landsman is the author of the full-length poetry collection, Too Much World, Not Enough Chocolate (Nightingale & Sparrow Press, 2024), and three other books, including the poetry chapbook Our Words, Our Worlds (Kelsay Books, 2021). She lives in South Florida where she spends as much time as possible at the beach. To learn more about her and her work, visit: https://peggylandsman.wordpress.com/
Photo: “Walk on a Warm Beach” by justenoughfocus is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
December 28, 2024
Weekend read: Odd poem: Winston Churchill, ‘Our Modern Watchwords’
I
The shadow falls along the shore
The search lights twinkle on the sea
The silence of a mighty fleet
Portends the tumult yet to be.
The tables of the evening meal
Are spread amid the great machines
And thus with pride the question runs
Among the sailors and marines
Breathes there the man who fears to die
For England, Home, & Wai-hai-wai.
II
The Admiral slowly paced the bridge
His mind intent on famous deed
Yet ere the battle joined he thought
Of words that help mankind in need
Words that might make sailors think
Of Hopes beyond all earthly laws
And add to hard and heavy toil
The glamour of a victorious cause.
*****
Around 115 years after it was written, the only known poem written by Winston Churchill as an adult was discovered by Roy Davids, a retired manuscript dealer from Great Haseley in Oxfordshire: ‘Our Modern Watchwords’, which was apparently inspired by Tennyson and Kipling.
Written between 1898 and 1900 when Churchill was a cornet (equivalent to today’s second lieutenant) in the 4th Hussars, the 10-verse poem is a tribute to the Empire. The author peppers the poem with the names of remote outposts defending Britain’s interests around the world, many of which he would have visited as a young officer and even fought at, including Weihaiwei in China, Karochaw in Japan and Sokoto in north-west Nigeria. Written in regular iambic tetrameter but with irregular rhymes, the poem exists in a tradition that stretches back to Homer’s Iliad: the soldier waiting impatiently for the battle to begin. As Churchill writes: ‘The silence of a mighty fleet / Portends the tumult yet to be.’
Davids, who says the poem “is by far the most exciting Churchill discovery I have seen”, admits it is merely “passable”.
Andrew Motion, the former Poet Laureate, goes further, calling it “heavy-footed”. “I didn’t know he wrote poems, though somehow I’m not surprised: oils, walls, why not poems as well?” said Motion. “This is pretty much what one would expect: reliable, heavy-footed rhythm; stirring, old-fashioned sentiments. Except for the lines ‘The tables of the evening meal/Are spread amid the great machines’, where the shadow of Auden passes over the page, and makes everything briefly more surprising.”
Despite its lack of literary virtues, however, the poem written in blue crayon on two sheets of 4th Hussars-headed notepaper was expected to raise between £12,000 to £15,000 when it went on sale in 2013. Its price reflected its rarity: the only other poem known to be penned by Churchill is the 12-verse ‘The Influenza’, which won a House Prize in a competition at Harrow school in 1890 when he was 15. However ‘Our Modern Watchwords’ failed to sell at the auction as bidding never reached the reserve price.
Churchill was well-known for his love of poetry. He won the Headmaster’s Prize at Harrow for reciting from memory Macaulay’s 589-line poem ‘Horatius at the Bridge‘.
Allan Packwood, director of the Churchill Archive Centre at Churchill College, Cambridge, said the wartime prime minister’s interest in poetry spanned the sophisticated to the more earthy: “In his speech accepting freedom of the city of Edinburgh in 1942, he quoted Robert Burns and ended by quoting the music hall entertainer Sir Harry Lauder, who was in the audience. This was no cheap politician’s trick, Churchill was an admirer of Lauder’s.”
By the way, Churchill was well-known for his oratory and repartee, but he wasn’t always the victor. My favourite story involves Richard Haldane in the 1920s. Churchill prodded Haldane’s ample belly and asked “What’s in there?” Haldane answered: “If it is a boy, I shall call him John. If it is a girl, I shall call her Mary. But if it is only wind, I shall call it Winston.”
December 27, 2024
Lindsay McLeod, ‘Last Call’
If this isn’t what you’ve yearned for
or indeed what you are craving
then cup your hands, drink deeply
of a sweeter misbehaving.
If you cannot find your wine inside
the glass that you were given,
taste the new with eyes and thighs
and dye your lips a deep vermillion
with a juice that has been pressed
from vines let grow out of control
that taste of summertime and
sex and drugs and rock and roll
because if you…
find distaste in your final breath
dressed in another’s ill fit clothes
remember, this did not just happen
sweetheart, this is what you chose.
*****
Lindsay McLeod is an Australian poet that has won a few things and is widely published. He just had to start messing about with words again lately. You’d think he’d know better by now, but oh no. Some of his most recent work can be found in DILLYDOUN REVIEW, GRAND LIL THINGS, DRAWN TO THE LIGHT, POETiCA and MORTAL MAGAZINE.
RHL: In addition to Mr McLeod’s self-description, let me add that I have been trying and failing to contact him. I don’t even have permission to post this poem. If anyone can put me in touch with him, I would be grateful.
Photo: “98/365: ♫ Red, Red Wine…” by rogersmj is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
December 25, 2024
Short poem: RHL, ‘Home Thoughts from the North’
Dog-skinny, winter’s mangy sun
Slinks between clouds.
A West Indian dog – there are none such here in the UK ….
Nor, there, such mangy suns.
*****
Some people equate a good Christmas with a family walk in the snow, others with family time on a beach. It all depends on what you grow up with, doesn’t it? With my first twelve years being on islands with palm trees, it has remained difficult for me in my decades of climate exile to appreciate more than a month or two of bleaker weather at a time. ‘Home Thoughts from the North’ was originally published in Snakeskin – thanks, George Simmers!
Best wishes for an appropriately weathered Merry Christmas to all… and apologies to Eliza for subjecting her to non-Canadian winters for so many years!
Photo: “Skinny puppy in Udaipur” by Dey is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
