"An Erasure Elegy For My Mother's Memory" by E.J. Schoenborn

Songs of Eretz Poetry Review is pleased to present “An Erasure Elegy For My Mother's Memory” by E.J. Schoenborn, a performance poet currently living in St. Paul, Minnesota. Schoenborn’s poetry has been featured in FreezeRay Poetry, Rising Phoenix Review, Voicemail Poems, Runestone Literary Journal, and Sparks.

An Erasure Elegy For My Mother's Memory

E.J. Schoenborn

                                        --after Susana Cardenas-Soto

1

After track practice in 6th grade,

my mother forgot to pick me up after school.

I walked five miles home as the light died.

She says it's nothing, a momentary lapse,

nothing for me to worry about.

We forgive this forgetting

because it is all we know how to do.

We pray to God to fix this,

to let us know what is going on.

God says, inactive thyroid,

says multiple sclerosis,

says no medicine can cure this,

but pills can halt the progress.

My mother quits her job at the bakery

because she can no longer lift the cakes,

because her mind sometimes only exists

in snatches of time and conversations

if she forgets to take her medicine.

2

After

my mother forgot          me   

                                          the light died.

She says          nothing,

                                  worry about

                      this forgetting

because it is all we                       do.

We pray

God says

         no

My mother quits

because she         no longer

                                                  exists

in                               conversations

if she forgets to take her medicine.

3

                                              the light died.

She says

                                        worry about

                         this forgetting

because  

God  

                                           exists

  

                        to take her

Poet's Notes: I started writing the first part of this poem for my mother who lives with multiple sclerosis.  One of the symptoms if not treated is a deteriorating memory. After finishing the poem, I realized it was incomplete and began to erase portions of it to mirror our situation and how it has affected us. 

Editor’s Note:  I was quite moved by this elegy, even more so since I found out that it is autobiographical.  I was not familiar with the subtraction form of poetry until receiving this one but can readily see that the form is a good choice for an elegy.  The subtractions follow the deterioration of the speaker's mother mentally and physically both through the loss of words and the use of the resultant white space.  I made an editorial decision to forgo supplying an accompanying graphic for this poem, allowing the placements of the words and white spaces to have their full effects.

The Final Readers Choice Award Contest Poem: “When I Am Old” by Tim Amsden

Editor’s Note:  Nominees for the Songs of Eretz Readers Choice Award have been published/reprinted in Songs of Eretz Poetry Review every weekday from February 19 through today.  We hope you enjoyed reading these poems, every one of which was a finalist in the recent Songs of Eretz Poetry Award Contest.  Vote for your favorite in March by sending an email to Editor@SongsOfEretz.com.  The winner will be announced in April and receive a one hundred dollar honorarium.

When I Am Old

I shall live in a zeppelin. You will climb the ladder

and find me in twilight, surrounded by sepia tones

and treasures: a yellowed valentine, 

a mastodon tooth in a wooden box,

a gnarled walking stick.

We will look out the windows at the bewildering world below.

I will bring out my bag of bright moments,

show you bruises almost gone.

We will linger over sips

of old brandy. You will look at my hands,

liver spots on bones, and think of your own

hands, which though firmly

fleshed, are beginning to show their age.

When you leave 

pretending many visits,

I will sigh, return everything 

to its place, untie the 

tether, and float 

away.

--Tim Amsden

Poet’s Notes:  There is a museum in Medicine Lodge, Kansas that looks like a cavalry stockade from a John Wayne movie. I haven’t been there for decades but I remember wandering through rooms filled with treasures from people in the area, laid out with little organization.

A memorial wreath made of human hair might be displayed beside an iron stirrup dropped by Coronado’s troops, and perhaps a variety of old food packaging and cleaning products would circle a child’s vintage toy cooking range.  Daguerreotypes and old photos in ornate frames could be clustered on a wall behind a glass case containing a scattering of fossils and Indian points and shards. Intermixed throughout were rusted farm implements, documents, clothes, toys, books, and vintage costume jewelry.  I love that place. Its treasures are reflections of everyday life for the community that created them. 

“When I  Am Old” (and I am now) contains a few of my treasures--a mastodon tooth found by my father nestled in a box I made for it, a twisted wooden cane fashioned by my uncle in Germany during World War II, and an old valentine. These I leave for you, dear reader, as I prepare to float away.

About the Poet:  Tim Amsden’s work has appeared in Pudding Magazine, Poetry Ireland Review, Potpourri, Sin Fronteras, Out of Line, Rockhurst Review, New Mexico Magazine, Arabesques Review, Contemporary Verse 2, Istanbul Literature Review, The Newer York, Rattle, and elsewhere. His first full-length book of poetry, Vanishing Point, was published in 2015. Amsden worked for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for twenty-five years and now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  “When I Am Old” was first published in the anthology Lasting: Poetic Visions of Aging (Pima Press, 2005).

Readers Choice Award Contest Poem: “The poet says this is how we should see” by Melinda Coppola

Editor’s Note:  Nominees for the Songs of Eretz Readers Choice Award have been or will be published/reprinted in Songs of Eretz Poetry Review every weekday from February 19 to February 27.  Vote for your favorite in March by sending an email to Editor@SongsOfEretz.com.  The winner will be announced in April and receive a one hundred dollar honorarium.

The poet says this is how we should see

Melinda Coppola

"Kaleidoscope" Watercolor and Ink on Paper
By J. Artemus Gordon

A prism is lifted to the sun. Imagine 

a million nuances of color and shine, 

fractal languages of symmetry

resting perfectly

between breaths or heartbeats. 

The artist knows the power of spaces,

without which there would be no means 

to shape the eye’s longing. 

Musician has this same knowing,

gleaned through the eardrum’s

oscillations:  there is no song 

without pauses

between notes. 

Someone in your diaspora of friends 

will die tonight, and in the moments 

between last exhale

and the doctor’s legal declaration,

a poem is written on the window

in frost.  It lingers 

only as long as two pairs of eyes can see it,

and if the heart that goes 

with one pair can hear it, 

a song will be born,

and if the soul that goes

with one pair can see it,

there will be a rendering

in charcoal, or paint, or crayon.

This is how life continues;

The poetry between things

must draw the attention 

of some realized aspect of God,

like you, or you,

and your near-desperate desire

to interpret the miracle

becomes the language, the love, the soil

from which

something else can be born.

Poet’s Notes:  I am fascinated with the importance of spaces between things and with the way that art and music and stars and poems and heartbeats cannot exist without them.  Poems come to me when I pay rapt attention to life with all of my senses. They begin as seeds cast off from images and sounds and feelings that long to be born again as words. Sometimes, when fed by my loving curiosity, those seeds can be coaxed to root and leaf and blossom. There must be space, though, for them to grow and flourish.  This poem was born of my desire to convey the immense beauty and possibilities that live in the quiet intervals between our scheduled activities and the things we check off our to-do lists.

About the Poet:  Melinda Coppola has been writing in some form for nearly five decades.  Her work has been published in several magazines, books, and periodicals including I Come from the World, Harpur Palate, Kaleidoscope, The Autism Perspective, Spirit First, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Welcome Home, and Celebrations.  She is an artist, yoga teacher, and mother to an amazing daughter with special needs and enjoys infusing the work of her heart with her voice as a poet.  Coppola nourishes her creative spirit with singing, early morning walks, collecting and making art with beach stones, cooking, spending quiet time with her husband and daughter, and communing with her cats. 

Readers Choice Award Contest Poem: “Passing On” by Carol Kner

Editor’s Note:  Nominees for the Songs of Eretz Readers Choice Award have been or will be published/reprinted in Songs of Eretz Poetry Review every weekday from February 19 to February 27.  Vote for your favorite in March by sending an email to Editor@SongsOfEretz.com.  The winner will be announced in April and receive a one hundred dollar honorarium.

Passing On

Carol Kner

It is the twenty-fourth of March, the day

when James the First was crowned in 1603,

"On the Line" Ink on Paper
By J. Artemus Gordon

a day remembered for Houdini’s birth

and Jules Verne’s death, a day we choose by chance

without fanfare, or magic, or lament

to sign a final will and testament.

Clients, whose relatively modest worth

will be somewhat reduced by legal fees, 

we have been invited to see to these

transactions in a lofty conference room

where time is told in paper coffee cups

and we can watch a year of seasons come

and go in just an hour: clouds in convoy,

then a swell of blue, then snow squalls, then sun

breaks richly through. A corner of the park

northwest shows trees preparing for rebirth

as we entrust this ponderous paper ark

to guide the business of life after death.

I, above named Testatrix (gaudy word

that paints a temptress in a topless dance),

being of sound mind, sensibly agree

to transfer to my agent or trustee

authority to act on my behalf

whenever the time comes, to be in charge

of everything—my money, real estate,

my goods and chattels, which include my great

grandmother’s gold thimble, the brick wall

in the basement that tends to crumble, the view

from our front porch—a whole array

accounted for. The diabetes gene,

the syncopated heart—they stow away.

We all sign our names on solid lines,

testators and witnesses alike

discussing whether they, when we have gone

to the next world, will have moved on

in this to Madagascar or Maui.

The Styx, where ancient gods swore sacred oaths

is nowhere near, only far away below

the Hudson and beyond, the sea. But here

high on the fortieth floor, we’re up against

the firmament, where They must know just when

the next life starts and whether trumpets blow.

Poet's Notes: My husband and I had been married for more than fifty years when our lawyer suggested that we revise our wills and bring them up to date. While we were waiting to sign them in the large, impersonal conference room of his mid-Manhattan law firm, it occurred to me that though this procedure was important to us, in the vast scheme of things it was a trivial concern.  Not only was it unremarkable compared to historical events and the power of nature, but also, though we approach such rituals with the best intentions, there is in reality little we can control in this world when we are no longer part of it. A process that I might have taken as a matter of course gave rise to a meditation on life's transience.

About the Poet:  Carol Stevens Kner served for many years as managing editor and staff writer at PRINT Magazine. At the age of sixty, she left that publication to pursue her interest in writing poems. Her work has appeared in Western Humanities Review, The Paris Review, Heliotrope, North American Review, and other journals. Several of her poems have been set to music by American composer Christopher Berg and performed in concert in New York City. Toadlily Press published her chapbook “Exposure” in 2010. 

Readers Choice Award Contest Poem: “The Great Escape” by Yoni Hammer-Kossoy

Editor’s Note:  Nominees for the Songs of Eretz Readers Choice Award have been or will be published/reprinted in Songs of Eretz Poetry Review every weekday from February 19 to February 27.  Vote for your favorite in March by sending an email to Editor@SongsOfEretz.com.  The winner will be announced in April and receive a one hundred dollar honorarium.

The Great Escape

Yoni Hammer-Kossoy*

The greatest escape I ever made was when I left Appleton, Wisconsin. - Harry Houdini

"Houdini" Ink on Paper
By J. Artemus Gordon

The box, the shipping crate,

the plate-glass tank, the flooded 

milk can, the Spanish Maiden, 

the solid steel chains

ladies and gentlemen,

the water torture chamber,

the shackles, the straitjacket, 

the triple-sealed jail cell,

the mirror cuffs with nested

Bramah locks, certified unbreakable,

sworn to be impossible, 

for the first time ever on stage.

The setup, the story, the pressure

of more, always more, hidden 

behind a curtain, dangled from a crane, 

pitched into a river, the fear, 

the crowd, they crave spectacular 

failure, they flock, they swarm,

they see what they want and miss 

how the trick works.

The fix, the shim, the palmed key, 

the milk can's fake rivets, the grease-

lined seam, the custom-built crate,

the half-nails, the hinged bottom,

the trap door, the air pocket, the slack

in the straitjacket, the jump-cuffs,

the bellows table, and the secrets

in sepia photos and stuttering movies

that we share: the changed name,

the home left behind, the great escape 

that never ends no matter how long 

I learn to hold my breath.

Poet's Notes:  A photo of Houdini in the prime of his career was the initial spark for this poem. It's clearly a publicity shot, but several details caught my eye: his good looks and bulging muscles, the heavy-duty chains and shackles, but most of all, his mischievous smile directed at the camera. It's quite an exaggerated image-- practically a comic book character turned flesh and blood, although we're maybe not quite sure if he's the hero or villain. And it's his smile that seems to say something to the effect of, "You might think this is impossible to escape but I know I can get out of this in about twenty seconds and not even break a sweat." It's also a remarkable image exactly because of its staged nature, which would fit right in with our current media-crazed reality, but back in the beginning decades of the 20th century was incredibly sophisticated.

I was hooked, and wanted to know more about Houdini and, after falling down a few online rabbit holes about his life (I wonder what he would think of this magical creation we call the internet), I was ready to start writing. I actually tried a few early drafts as a sonnet, knowing that I wanted to utilize some kind of form with the given subject matter, but the poem appropriately slipped its bonds into a more expansive arrangement. And when I found Houdini's words about his great escape, I felt the poem once again transform from simply a tribute to a master performer to something that resonated at a personal level.

I too live in a place far from where I grew up and interact with the world with a different name and through the poem I wanted to try to explore some of the dynamics of self and self-invention. The extent to which the poem hopefully manages to communicate all of the above represents, I suppose, a third and final escape--namely the creative act itself, through which ideas and feelings become expressed as something new in the world.

About the Poet:  See “Our Staff” http://www.songsoferetz.com/p/about-our-editor-frequent-contributors.html.

*Yoni Hammer-Kossoy was not invited to be a Songs of Eretz Frequent Contributor until AFTER the 2018 Songs of Eretz Poetry Award Contest was closed for submissions.  Therefore, he is eligible for the Readers Choice Award this year and this year only.  So, if you like his poem best, do not hesitate to vote for it. 

Gordon & McBride Grab Bylines in Star*Line

Songs of Eretz Poetry Review is pleased to announce that our Editor-in-Chief, Steven Wittenberg Gordon, and one of our Frequent Contributors, Lauren McBride, have poems appearing in the Winter 2018 edition of Star*Line, the journal of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association.

"Nightshade" by Steven Wittenberg Gordon

"Trying NOT to Make a Sound" by Lauren McBride

Readers Choice Award Contest Poem: “Deceptive Cadence” by Carol Kner

Editor’s Note:  Nominees for the Songs of Eretz Readers Choice Award have been or will be published/reprinted in Songs of Eretz Poetry Review every weekday from February 19 to February 27.  Vote for your favorite in March by sending an email to Editor@SongsOfEretz.com.  The winner will be announced in April and receive a one hundred dollar honorarium.

Deceptive Cadence

Carol Kner

I have to face the sources and the flickering presence of my own ambivalence as a Jew; the daily, mundane anti-Semitisms of my entire life. 
--From Split at the Root by Adrienne Rich

"Dance" Watercolor & Graphite on Paper
By J. Artemus Gordon

At the Center for Jewish History

because of terrorists

we wait in a patient line

to pass the security check,

old people, families with children, couples

out for a concert on Saturday night.

We all pass muster and stroll into the theater,

a long narrow room shaped, I think,

like a shoebox.

A Jew box, I say out loud,

headlong words born of rhyme

without gestation as thought.

You nod indulgently

(our family is knit with Jewish yarn),

but your mouth rounds in a small o.

And the jingle turns on me and jeers.

Gas chambers and coffins imitate 

its narrow rectangular dimensions.

The tension of its long closed oo moans

through the music we have come to hear,

melodies deported with Transylvanian musicians

who never came back, resurrected by gypsies.

Their harmonic minor wanders indiscriminately

through dance and prayer,

a Diaspora of augmented seconds

intoning liturgy, celebrating weddings, keening for the dead,

lamentations as comforting as skin.

The concert ends and we rise

to applaud the music makers,

the cimbalom, the zongura, the drums, the strings,

the songs whose deportation failed.

Like football fans whose team has won,

we file out exuberantly

into a wet night,

the rain singing its own small song,

beating its careless time.

Poet's Notes:  My husband was born in Budapest and, though he came to the U.S. as a five-year-old in 1940, he enthusiastically maintained his relationship with Hungarian culture throughout his life. Thus, when Marta Sebestyén and her group Muszikás were in New York presenting a concert at the Center for Jewish History, he bought tickets for the whole family.

In 2002 we entered the auditorium through a security checkpoint that in 2017 has become routine but at the time was a relatively new requirement. No such safeguards could have prevented that vast cruelty Jews and gypsies in Europe suffered during the '30s and '40s, but though so much was lost, there were survivors and, as the concert proved, their music and traditions live on.

It is worth noting that Sebestyén is known for reviving and performing old Hungarian and gypsy folk music. When Béla Bartók traveled through Hungary on a similar collecting mission in the early 1900s, he stayed with my husband's grandparents in Gyoma, a village in eastern Hungary. My husband's respect for the preservation of historic culture carried on a family tradition.

About the Poet:  Carol Stevens Kner served for many years as managing editor and staff writer at PRINT Magazine. At the age of 60, she left that publication to pursue her interest in writing poems. Her work has appeared in Western Humanities Review, The Paris Review, Heliotrope, North American Review, and other journals. Several of her poems have been set to music by American composer Christopher Berg and performed in concert in New York City. Toadlily Press published her chapbook “Exposure” in 2010. 

Readers Choice Award Contest Poem: “Autismville” by Melinda Coppola

Editor’s Note:  Nominees for the Songs of Eretz Readers Choice Award have been or will be published/reprinted in Songs of Eretz Poetry Review every weekday from February 19 to February 27.  Vote for your favorite in March by sending an email to Editor@SongsOfEretz.com.  The winner will be announced in April and receive a one hundred dollar honorarium.

Autismville

Melinda Coppola

I can’t tell you
it is an unpleasant thing
to live in the quirky neighborhood,

"Puzzle" Watercolor and Ink on Paper
By J. Artemus Gordon

on the far side of the river,
a good ways from the thickest part
of the frantic throng.

Here, we are daily looking up,
fixating and stimming
on green minnow leaves
that shimmer against the waters of the sky.

Here we have our own customs;
the daily waking song,
the recitation of dreams,
the morning questions and videotaped answer
for her to play back over and over,
the reassurances:
Yes, there will be snack. Yes, Mom is a girl.
Yes, there will be girl hair when we leave.

The life we’ve grown into,
first she and I and then he
who married into this confluence
of ordered disorder,
this life has authentic charm.

We go slow, we don’t try to measure up.
Our victories are sweeter
for how long they take to manifest
and mysterious
for how quickly they can disappear.

I can’t say it’s tragic in this virtual village,
this parallel universe
peopled with other singular folk
who understand the need for things
like space and processing time,
patience and velvet compassion,
smooth voices, soft dolls,
sweet routine and
more spice in everything.

We have magic here, I tell you.
Songs that play in color,
voices with texture,
folks who spin and swing and
hum and sing.

And the leaves! The glorious
minnow leaves,
dancing upstream,
between the clouds,
and laughing.

Poet’s Notes:  My young adult daughter lives with my husband and me.  She also lives with Autism, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and a great deal of anxiety. She presents as quite challenged to the uninitiated eye, and our lives are far from typical. 

I often feel that we live in a parallel universe, moving at an entirely different pace while the world speeds past.  The children of friends and family meet their expected milestones and move on, and we amble and pause, spin in circles, and forge our own footpaths through the weedy brush. Our milestones are different, but if and when they come, we celebrate them well and take nothing for granted. 

It’s not an easy life but it’s also not the grand tragedy that some people seem to believe it is. I wrote this poem to offer a different perspective to those who feel sorry for us and those who move in the faster, more conventional lanes.

About the Poet:  Melinda Coppola has been writing in some form for nearly five decades.  Her work has been published in several magazines, books, and periodicals including I Come from the World, Harpur Palate, Kaleidoscope, The Autism Perspective, Spirit First, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Welcome Home, and Celebrations.  She is an artist, yoga teacher, and mother to an amazing daughter with special needs and enjoys infusing the work of her heart with her voice as a poet. 

Coppola nourishes her creative spirit with singing, early morning walks, collecting and making art with beach stones, cooking, spending quiet time with her husband and daughter, and communing with her cats.  This poem was first published on her personal blog twenty four may on June 8 2017. 

Readers Choice Award Contest Poem: “7 a.m.” by Melinda Coppola

Editor’s Note:  Nominees for the Songs of Eretz Readers Choice Award have been or will be published/reprinted in Songs of Eretz Poetry Review every weekday from February 19 to February 27.  Vote for your favorite in March by sending an email to Editor@SongsOfEretz.com.  The winner will be announced in April and receive a one hundred dollar honorarium.

7 a.m.

Melinda Coppola

"Emerge" Watercolor & Ink on Paper
J. Artemus Gordon

I entered your room quietly,
with loving stealth,
stood inches from where you slept
curled into the warmth of your sleep nest,
pausing one round moment
to take in the sight of you, just
to hug you with my eyes
before we began
the ritual we’d perfected over
two decades of mornings.

There we were
in our assigned places,
me leaning gently above,
you just beginning to stir
as I sang you awake.
There were your hands
reaching for my hair,
first right side then left,
like always, like a touchstone
to remind you it’s safe
to be awake and alive.

Pink walls and ceiling, pastel rug,
whispered, made-up song,
you under soft
layers of things;
assorted spreads, a quilt, some blankets,
one embroidered with your name
and the date you debuted,
a gift at birth from a relative
on your absent
dad’s side that met you
once maybe, whose name
I’ve quite forgotten,
who is surely long dead.

I flash-mused on what she’d feel,
this nameless giver of named blankets,
if she could ghost unseen
into your bedroom, this morning
to see what you’ve become.

Would it be grief
for all the ways you’ll never be,
the way you arrived
with unseen challenges,
diagnoses not yet named,
a baby who would remain,
in many ways, a child?

Would it be curiosity,
your differences intriguing,
offering perspectives
she’d never considered
while alive,
tapping on the doors
of her phantom compassion,
awakening a deep patience,
a human reunion with her own
estranged otherness,
the selves she, while living, shunned? 

I hope she would be filled
with the color of pure delight
as she saw you still loving
her decades old gift,
for its essential pinkness,
its enduring softness,
its well-named comfort
in the place you call safe,
in the place you dream,
in the place you are perfect
with no one there
to tell you otherwise,
in the place you dream.

Poet’s Notes:  My young adult daughter lives with Autism, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and a great deal of anxiety. She is a stranger to the ways most of us learn to survive and thrive in a confusing world. Her vulnerability is a big concern for me, yet she is finding her own ways to cope and to calm the sensory storms any given day can present.

E’s pink room, and her bed layered with soft blankets that echo the colors of the walls is a place of refuge for her. The rituals that we’ve created give her structure and comfort. 

In this poem I tried to capture the tenderness of a morning moment before I sang her awake, when my eyes went to the monogrammed blanket on her bed. I imagined the giver joining us in spirit in that pink room, seeing that baby blanket. What would she understand from this scene?

About the Poet:  Melinda Coppola has been writing in some form for nearly five decades.  Her work has been published in several magazines, books, and periodicals including I Come from the World, Harpur Palate, Kaleidoscope, The Autism Perspective, Spirit First, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Welcome Home, and Celebrations.  She is an artist, yoga teacher, and mother to an amazing daughter with special needs and enjoys infusing the work of her heart with her voice as a poet. 

Coppola nourishes her creative spirit with singing, early morning walks, collecting and making art with beach stones, cooking, spending quiet time with her husband and daughter, and communing with her cats.  This poem was first published on her personal blog twenty four may on April 20, 2017. 

Announcing the 1st Annual Songs of Eretz Readers Choice Award Contest

Songs of Eretz Poetry Review is pleased to announce the commencement of the first annual Songs of Eretz Readers Choice Award Contest.  All non-winning finalists for the 2018 Songs of Eretz Poetry Award are eligible.  The winner of the Readers Choice Award will be chosen by YOU, the readers, and will receive a one hundred dollar honorarium.  One poem will be presented each weekday from February 19 to February 27. 

The poems in the running for the 2018 Songs of Eretz Readers Choice Award are, in alphabetical order by title:

“7 a.m.” by Melinda Coppola

“Autismville” by Melinda Coppola

“Deceptive Cadence” by Carol Kner

“The Great Escape” by Yoni Hammer-Kossoy*

“Passing On” by Carol Kner

“The Poet Says This Is How You Should See” by Melinda Coppola

“When I Am Old” by Tim Amsden

Voting will take place in March, and the winner will be announced in April.  Vote by sending the title of your favorite poem via email to Editor@SongsOfEretz.com.  In order to be fair to all contestants, please hold off on voting until March after all of the contest poems have been published/reprinted.

*Yoni Hammer-Kossoy was not invited to be a Songs of Eretz Frequent Contributor until AFTER the 2018 Songs of Eretz Poetry Award Contest was closed for submissions.  Therefore, he is eligible for the Readers Choice Award this year and this year only.  So, if you like his poem best, do not hesitate to vote for it. 

The Third & Final Poem of the Winning Set for the 2018 Songs of Eretz Poetry Award

What I Mean By Beauty

Doris Ferleger

"Dream" Watercolor and Acrylic on Paper
by J. Artemus Gordon

What I mean by beauty is not the strange red sky

you said belonged only to me or the regular blue sky

with white clouds you claimed as your own

because you believed, you said, only what you could see.

What I mean by beauty is how you trusted me,

let my words wash over you though you had

no idea what I was talking about when I said,

the sky's fire-red feet rake across our bodies.

What I mean by beauty is not the brilliant broach

of white moon against the eloquent deep blue,

the kind of blue that enunciates and disrobes

in the parking lot at the Home Depot.

I mean how the heavyset couple walks out

of the store side by side, how each then drifts,

one in front of the other, how they look happy,

unadorned, with white PVC piping poking out

of the supersized orange cart, how they indulge

me when I point to the sliver of moon the way

a child might. How the woman with a blond-streaked

wig stops her jalopy beside me, her front seat filled

with marked-down shiny fat-leafed rubber plants,

how she says, I see you got some too! Though

I got coreopsis with spidery leaves, pale yellow flowers,

tiny stars, I agree with her since she just wants to say

from One came many and how we need each other.

What I mean by beauty is when I point to the moon,

the woman with the bright abundant wig laughs

and says, Ya gotta love that! How she doesn't turn her head

to look back at the white crescent. She is sure of love

as she drives off with her rubber plants. What I mean

by beauty is freedom; when I say freedom I mean how

the moon lifts us, seats us into the deep curve of her hip.

Poet’s Notes:  For our second date forty years ago, my late husband had asked if I would go with him to collect soil samples. He was a scientist. I was an English teacher and poet.  He became a physician who did a fellowship in statistics and epidemiology in his late fifties. He trusted statistics; he trusted bodies to speak their truths; he trusted me, though the language I spoke of metaphor and image was not his language. I trusted him, though the language of numbers and spleen and pancreas was not mine.

I knew on that second date that I wanted to spend my life with him. When in my late fifties I was asked to write a poem about beauty, I immediately thought of that mutual trust that became the bedrock for our thirty-five-year marriage. I was interrupted from beginning the poem by my mundane desire to cash in on the plant sale at Home Depot before the store closed.

Yet beauty kept insisting itself: the beauty of unself-conscious human connection, the beauty of our human need for connection, our incontrovertible connection to each other and to the moon in all its phases, the crescent of love lifting us, holding us even as we shop for specials on rubber plants. Likely I would not have seen all this as beauty had I not just been immersing myself in thinking about beauty.

Editor’s Note:  One of the amazing things about well-written poetry is its ability to transform the mundane and quotidian into the sublime.  Ferleger has accomplished that here with her epiphanies in the parking lot.  Her modern take on the quatrain would make Emily Dickinson proud.  

“What I Mean By Beauty” was first published by Poet Lore in 2010.  A bio of the poet and comments by Guest Contest Judge Former Kansas Poet Laureate Eric McHenry may be found here http://www.songsoferetz.com/2018/02/announcing-winner-of-2018-songs-of.html.