October Poems: Verse-Virtual keeps turning a new page and revealing beautiful moments, like the colors of the autumn hills

My thanks to editor Jim Lewis for producing another excellent issue of Verse-Virtual, the online poetry community and monthly publication, that this month offers work by 46 poets. 

Here's what Jim has to say on how poets respond to the difficulties of a full-blown pandemic and the political chaos of our day, even as October, arguably the most inspiring of months, has begun to turn its autumn lights on us:

"Poets have always been active participants in the struggle to survive difficult times. We write to persuade. We write to denounce. We write to document. We write to challenge the wrongs that we see. What we do NOT do is throw up our hands and surrender to despair. "this is not the time to howl" is my personal poem of defiance. If yours has not been written yet, write it. Share it. Use the gift of your words to encourage everyone you can reach to stand up and be counted in this conflict."

As a contributing editor for Verse-Virtual, going on five years now, I have the fortunate opportunity to publish new work each month in the online journal. 

I have three poems, my standard quota, in the October issue. The first is my comic take (as I hope should be clear) on a trailside warning posted at Notch View, a beautiful nature preserve and one of my favorite woods-walking sites in Berkshire County,  Massachusetts.The poem plays on a misunderstanding of the sign's use of the phrase "classic style." The site managers are, of course, speaking of the trail's use by cross-country skiers.

The poem's speaker (that's me), as the poem indicates, is thinking about everything else to which the term 'classic style' might apply.  The poem begins this way:

Classical Style Only

My daughter slide-steps sideways
down the path at Notchview Reservation,
arms akimbo, see-sawing in stately fashion
She’s ‘walking like an Egyptian,’
so the cant phrase goes,
because of course the trail sign clearly states:
“Classical Style Only”
I am trying to imagine a fashionable Athenian
or Augustan way of proceeding
while lacking a toga, or a tunic,
or whatever cloaked sublimely homely Socrates
when he paced up and down the Agora
directing flights of reasoned disputation
to mind-unfogging peepholes into the ‘World of Forms,’...  The second poem "October Rain" attempts to describe someof the characteristics of its subject, and, I hope, needs no further explanation.  The final poem is an attempt to put into words the feelingsproduced by an instrumental song entitled "As Times Change" by Kathryn Toyama that I find almost (but not quite) inexpressibly moving. It's at least my third try at offering awritten response to this piece of music, which (of course) does not require one. Please take a look. The poems can be found at Verse-Virtual Oct. 2020