SONGS OF ERETZ POETRY REVIEW

Theme: ARTIFACTS

SPRING ISSUE 2025

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Unless otherwise indicated, all art is taken from "royalty-free" Internet sources.

Chief Executive Editor

Steven Wittenberg Gordon

Co-Editors-in-Chief

Terri L. Cummings

Charles A. Swanson

Guest Art Editor

Terri Lynn Cummings

Frequent Contributors

Terri Lynn Cummings

Steven Wittenberg Gordon

John C. Mannone

Vivian Finley Nida

Howard F. Stein

Charles A. Swanson

Tyson West

Biographies of our editorial staff & frequent contributors may be found on the "Our Staff" page.

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A Letter from the Co-Editor-in-Chief

Charles A. Swanson

Featured Frequent Contributor

Howard F. Stein

“Shards of My Life”

“Out of Sync”

“The Moment Stone Became Artifact: An As-If Tale

Other Frequent Contributors

Steven Wittenberg Gordon

“Didgeridoo”

Vivian Finley Nida

“Vaseline Glass Jar”

“Lepenski Vir: Europe’s Oldest Urban Settlement”

Tyson West

“Inheritance”

“Pipe Dreams”

John C. Mannone

“The Photographer”

Charles A. Swanson

“Artifact”

“The Grinding Stone”

Terri Lynn Cummings

“Impression”

Guest Poets

John Delaney

“Reindeer People”

Sean Whalen

“Legends”

“Zenith”

Paul A. Freeman

“Found! A Roman Knife Handle”

“The Mission”

John Reinhart

(former Frequent Contributor)

“Taking Aim”

Michael Victor Bowman

“Half Life”

“1879, a Shovel and an Idea”

A J Dalton

“Forsake the Ground”

William L. Ramsey

“Clinging to My Keyboard as Waves Crash over Me”

Richard Magahiz

“The mystery of the thermionic”

B. Fulton Jennes

“Atlas of Escape”

Salvatore Difalco

“Cuneiform Exercise Tablet”

Mark A. Fisher

“arrowhead”

Guest Poet, General Submission

William L. Ramsey

“Green? With a White Ribbon?”

Book Review:

Concerning the Service

Clayton Spencer

Reviewed by Charles A. Swanson

Frequent Contributor News

Financial Support

2025 Themes: What We are Looking For

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A Letter from the Co-Editor-in-Chief

Memory being fickle, I double-checked something I had once learned with a friend who had long taught Appalachian Folklore. I questioned Ricky Cox, “Artifacts are part of material culture, are they not?” He answered me with a quick and emphatic, “Of course.”

Material culture consists of the things—such as houses and barns—that identify a way of life. In the Southside tobacco region of Virginia where I live, old log tobacco barns are an example. But it’s not just the big material things but also the small material things that mark a culture. For Appalachia, I think of the three-legged Dutch oven one can use to bake bread on a fireplace hearth. Considered in such a way, an issue about artifacts is more broadly an issue about things, about objects that define a way of living in the world.

Of great interest to me is the definition that includes certain archaic-acting people under the umbrella of artifact. One of Tyson West’s poems, “Pipe Dreams,” brings that definition to life in the person of his grandfather.

As I read poems for the issue, I was most surprised by what good use fantasy and science fiction writers found for the theme. I soon saw the logic of their thinking, and I mentally applauded them.

This is a good issue. I’m pleased that such strong poetry keeps coming our way, and that we have the great pleasure of presenting it to you.

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Featured Frequent Contributor

Shards of My Life

free verse

Howard F. Stein

I have made my small room

At the old folks’ home

A museum of my life –

A story told in shards.

Collectibles? No.

Memorabilia? No.

Knick knacks? No.

Fragments of a life, where

They all once had a place;

I knew where they belonged –

Now, in disarray, more strewn

Than arranged; still,

Though, my fragments.

Mom’s turquoise blue ceramic ash tray,

Rounded, so smooth to my touch;

My family’s old tin Menorah,

Still clogged with years of wax;

My mom’s wooden night stand;

A yellowed slip of paper,

My dad’s hand-written notes

For a grocery list;

A color photo of my dad sitting

At his card table studying Jewish prayers;

A wine-stained Hebrew prayer book,

Falling apart, that my maternal grandpa

Probably brought over from Russia in early 1900’s;

My 1949 Hebrew-English Siddur,

Used daily for years, that my dad

Eventually bound with black electrical tape;

The Mezuzah my parents attached to their

Apartment door post when they

Were first married, around 1939;

Two short, dented old

Aluminum candlesticks,

Holders for Shabbos candles;

Army medals and photos,

And the tri-fold burial flag

Of my Uncle Hymen,

Dad’s youngest brother,

Killed in the Battle of the Bulge

In World War II, the decorated

Sergeant for whom I am named;

Many old, small black and white photos

Of my family, going back a century,

Now stacked in a pile

In my mom’s old bedroom dresser drawer;

My dad’s aluminum drip grind coffee pot;

An old TWA pack of playing cards.

My dad’s prayer shawl (Tallith);

A black-and-white photo of my dad

In his late 80’s, my two-year old son

Aloft in my arms, I with full black beard,

And a still healthy head of hair;

A hand-carved wooden train caboose

Made by a local Oklahoma craftsman

Some 40 years ago, when cabooses still

Completed the long line of freight cars.

Some of these treasured chips,

I placed deliberately,

Others, just where they would fit.

Not quite random, but none at home,

Vestiges of long ago,

A time before they were shards –

As if, when assembled, they

Might have made an unbroken,

Glazed, baked clay

Vase or pot –

No Keatsean Grecian Urn,

So plain, so simple, so ordinary,

But it was whole.

Poet’s Notes: One of my earliest mental associations to the theme of “Artifacts” for the Spring 2025 issue of SOE, was to the field of my graduate training aeons ago: anthropology. In it, archaeology, physical/biological anthropology, and human evolution were its foundation. In archaeological readings and seminars, ancient pottery and potsherds were an inevitable topic. As my mind drifted in remembering this, I thought of notions of wholeness, fragmentation, and efforts to reconstruct early pottery, and its cultural setting, from its pieces.

My mind further drifted into my own current life situation, and from it emerged images of pottery and its shards as metaphors. Close to two and a half years ago, my family placed me in a medical assisted living facility. In my small, box-like apartment, I had little space on/in which to put various objects I had hurriedly assembled and brought from home.

As I gazed on the surfaces and walls when the theme of “artifacts” was given, my mind connected what I saw here with my early anthropological training. In a way that writers often say, “The poem wrote itself” after that. Toward the end of the poem, as my unconscious wrestled with my sense of shattered wholeness, the earlier SOE theme of English poet John Keats’ poem, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” came to mind. I consciously incorporated an allusion to it in my own poem – a kind of striving at further linkage and mending in the face of rupture and shattering.

Editor’s Notes: Stein’s poem makes me think of the question, “If you were trapped on a desert island, what three things would you take with you?” Of course, the answer to the island question would be materials to help one survive another day. However, there is also the survival of the human spirit, above and beyond the mere body. I hear Stein’s answer to spiritual needs in his poem. CAS

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Out of Sync
free verse
Howard F. Stein

On every wall
Of my old folks’ home,
Round analog clocks with
Sweeping second hands,
Watch over us –
Work rhythms to be maintained,
Schedules to be met,
Protocols to be fulfilled,
Dressing, bathing, feeding,
Dispensing pills four times a day,
Traffic jam of walkers and wheelchairs,
Making their way to the dining room
At mealtime, emergence from the kitchen
Of a phalanx of servers with food carts.

Everything in its place,
Everything on time, since
Doing everything on time
Is essential to the work.
“Time and motion” perfected –
Frederick Winslow Taylor* would
Have been proud. . .
A flaw, though, forever
Keeps these imperfect
Timekeeping artifacts
In constant dispute
With one another –
Though tuned to the same pitch,
They cannot agree on the time.
A rule of error never wavers:
Plus-Or-Minus Ten Minutes.
All clocks stay fastidiously
Within this range.
Every few weeks
An administrator calls
The clock smith to make rounds,
Correct the error, then set
The clocks in agreement once again . . .

Which lasts a few days
Until disagreement once again
Creeps in. Even replacement
Of an old clock with a new one
Does not disrupt this rhythm.
Everyone is beside themselves
As to how to carry out their tasks,
To be on time for anything, to keep
The workflow moving swiftly.
Oblivious to the real problem,
They attack each other,
As though they were personally
At fault for getting behind.

Who can do their work right,
When no one knows
How to accomplish it on time?
Chaos, the result
And final victor, since no one
Realizes the clocks will
Always vary between ten minutes
Early and ten minutes late –
And will stay that way
Despite everyone’s best efforts
To bring time under control.

*Frederick Winslow Taylor, early 20th century American mechanical engineer, author of Principles of Scientific Management (1901), founder of industrial engineering, to reduce “wasted time” and produce efficiency, famed for “time and motion” studies of assembly line workers.

Poet’s Notes: Many large-scale facilities now are the residences of elderly people. Many of these "old folks' homes" have various levels of medical care. In the writer's experience of working in health sciences centers for many decades, overworked, understaffed, medical staff at all levels strive (and are often administratively driven) to keep tight schedules in everything from administering medication to residents/patients, to bathing, toileting, dressing, preparing for bed, serving food, etc.

Often, despite their best efforts to maintain a predictable work-flow schedule, in reality, timetables become close to chaotic, helter-skelter, for instance, being slowed down because of an aide having to devote more time than expected to a particular patient, which throws the entire operation into confusion, if not chaos. This is true even in this age of computer-based cell phones with digital clocks, and computers everywhere.

The poem above is built around the now anachronistic artifact of the once-ubiquitous second-hand sweeping circular analog wall clock in every room of the facility, by which medical and administrative staff, and even patients, were supposed to monitor their activity. The world I depict is true to life, and the notion that the specific artifacts, analog wall clocks, with their often-unreliable accuracy, forever out-of-sync, seem to have a "mind of their own," is a commonly used phrase in the old folks' home.

Editor’s Notes: I’m still devoted to the archaic analog wrist watch with its sweeping hands. One day, one of my students said she could not read analog time, so I showed her my watch with its big “G” and accompanying script on the watch’s face. The watch supplied no helpful numbers, only small blocks where 3, 6, 9, and 12 should be. I liked the plainness of the watch’s face. I asked her how she would read the time since she had trouble with analog. She looked at it and said, “I think it’s a good thing it says “Guess.” CAS

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The Moment Stone Became Artifact, An As-If Tale.
free verse

Howard F. Stein

A million or so years ago,
a member of a small
Australopithecus band
returned from the hunt
empty-handed, dejected,
certain of reprimand, if not
expulsion. Whether they had
words for it or not, their motto
was, “The good man is the generous man.”
equality through sharing,
their unstated rule. For sure
everyone had his bad days,
when they came home with
nothing to contribute, and so
partook of another’s success.
but in the end, it all evened out—

except for Bad Luck Joe.
Like the other men in their twenties,
Joe was strong and could hurl large rocks
at animals during the hunt,
except that his rocks did not
even stun the animal, let alone
injure or kill him. Joe became
his fellow hunters’ target
of relentless ridicule.

Dejected, discouraged, he went off
by himself, picked up a large stone – flint?
Obsidian?—and, in frustration, began
to strike a second stone beneath it
with hard blows, like beating on it.
Embarrassment and rage drove him
to crash harder and harder,
stone to stone – catharsis, maybe
wrath toward himself for his inadequacy,
or toward the members of his band
who mercilessly mocked him—

As he bashed away, something cracked;
stone chips began to fall off, a new shape
began to emerge, not rounded here,
angular there, but the beginning
of something vaguely sharpening,
a core, but of what?

Somehow in the mind
of this primitive man,
at least for a few seconds,
fury turned to thought.
He paused, picked his stone up,
examined it, seemed puzzled,
as if wondering what was happening.
He commenced now with deliberate
strikes, as if he were thinking
of something in mind, still rough-hewn.

Eventually, he picked it up,
returned to his group,
strangely lifted by what he had made.
He took it with him on the next
group hunt, hoisted his rock,
gashed the animal, and gashed again,
aided by his fellow hunters,
felled the animal, finally a prize for meat.
Many men gathered around him
to see what this misfit had made.
Fool, now hero, he and the small band
of hunters carried their quarry
back to the camp to feed everyone.

Joe had no words for what his mind
had directed his hands and arms to do
with this large, ordinary, stone.
But he had hewn and crafted
Something from nature that was
now more than just nature:
maybe—a tool. Others in the band later
followed suit, watched him work
with his own stone, then
went off to improvise on their own.

In the shadow of humiliation,
a hand-axe had been born.

Poet’s Notes: Shortly after I learned of the Artifact-theme for the Spring 2025 issue of Songs of Eretz, the wry thought came to me of composing a would-be origin myth for the Paleolithic stone-axe. In my long-ago graduate anthropological training, courses such as archaeology and physical/biological anthropology were saturated with the evolution of the earliest human artifacts, stone hand-axes and their successors. I thought that if anything could qualify as an artifact, an early hand-axe would be its sine qua non.

I thought to "put to use" memories of what I had learned, and to compose an imaginary tale in poetry-form of how one of the earliest, if not the first, human hand-axes came about. The idea felt outlandish, implausible, if not outrageous from the start. Yet the poem grew on me. It turned out to be a common human experience, steeped in emotions and relationships, that just happened to involve the fashioning of stone into simple hand-axe.

For me, the fashioning of an artifact was embedded in the early human setting from which it emerged. Although the origin myth still feels goofy, the ordinary human story is as familiar now as it is ancient.

Editor’s Notes: Stein’s story of Bad Luck Joe intrigues me, especially when Joe begins to think. The process of a mind awakening fills much of William Golding’s The Inheritors. As the origin of many inventions is lost in time, so is the evolvement of the dawning light in the darkness of the mind. What triggered our creativity, our inventiveness, our perception, our humanness? Did our thinking evolve along at the same rate as our pliable fingers? Did we learn first by using our hands? CAS

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Other Frequent Contributors

Photograph by Alison Gordon

Didgeridoo

quatrains in AABB rhyme

Steven Wittenberg Gordon

Cave paintings in Australia show

That twenty thousand years ago

Well before there was a Jew

Aboriginies played the didgeridoo.

That haunting droning first was heard

According to legend passed down by word

When an Aboriginal great-grand sire

Gathered eucalyptus for his fire.

As he held a branch over the flaming pit

He noted termites had hollowed it

And within the wood still scurried about.

He put the stick to his lips and blew them out.

The Cosmic Powers smiled at the man

At how mercy and kindness through him ran

And as a reward for his true worth

The didgeridoo was gifted to earth.

Poet’s Notes: The didgeridoo that I play is an authentic one made from a branch of a eucalyptus tree that was hollowed out by termites, harvested by Aboriginies, and concert tuned to a low D by specialized artisans working out of a solar powered hut in the middle of Australian Outback. My poem is based on the Legend of the didgeridoo that I discovered during the research I conducted before purchasing mine.

Playing the didgeridoo has some things in common with how I write poetry. There are no melodies, no sheet music, no rules for playing the didgeridoo. The player puts the instrument to his lips and must accept the sound that is produced. Rhythm may be introduced, as may intonation and color, but the flow of the music is not entirely under the control of the player. A good session with the didge results in a feeling of contentment, satisfaction, and even wonder. I enjoy a similar feeling after composing a good poem.

Editor’s Notes: I was already intrigued by Gordon’s poem before I saw the picture he sent. He also shared with us, the editors, a video/audio clip of a song he played on the didgeridoo. I loved it, and I wish I could also share it here. The sound was not a gimmick or unworldly, but mesmerizing and beautiful. I will admit, however, that the didge would not be as easy to carry around for a street performance or a gig as a guitar. CAS

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Photograph by Vivian Finley Nida

Vaseline Glass Jar

epistolary poem

Vivian Finley Nida

Sister,

Glassware in the China cabinet

hasn’t been dusted for months.

I started to tackle it but got distracted

because the first item I picked up

was Grandma’s yellow, hobnail glass jar with lid,

like a five-inch acorn wearing its cap.

Remember when we were in high school,

Mama often reminded us

it was Vaseline glass, hard to find

because the government confiscated uranium

during World War II, and uranium dioxide was used

to make the glass the color of Vaseline, thus the name.

Knowing this didn’t stop us from looking. Our narrow roads

wound through small towns, making it easy to stop, to search

in second-hand stores, but we never found Vaseline glass.

When we were young at Grandma’s, that yellow jar

sat on the right-hand side of her dressing table,

back by the mirror where we could see ourselves head to toe.

I loved to stand there every morning and watch Grandma

sit at the table, grip the wooden handle of her Fuller brush,

sweep the horsehair bristles through her white hair,

and twist it into a bun at the nape of her neck.

Then she collected the hair from her brush.

I thought she would drop it beside the dressing table

into the metal trash can, the cream colored one with faded roses.

Instead, she lifted the lid from the yellow jar and placed the hair inside.

Do you know where the jar came from? A wedding gift?

The glass was popular from 1880’s through 1920’s. Anyway, I’d

never seen anyone else save hair, let alone in a gleaming yellow jar.

Puzzled, I asked why. In a matter of fact way, she said that one day

when her hair was thin, she would use these strands

to embellish her bun. Her reply, enough and more—

a declaration before change and a way to manage it.

Poet’s Notes: To create colored glass, minerals are added to the molten mixture during production. Adding only 0.1 or 0.2 percent of uranium dioxide creates a yellow color that looks like Vaseline petroleum jelly. In addition to coloring the glass, uranium dioxide causes the glass to glow green under a blacklight and makes it slightly radioactive. The emissions, however, are barely stronger than normal background radiation everyone is exposed to daily, so displaying the glass should not be a problem.

It was most popular during the Victorian era. During WWII, the government seized all uranium and banned manufacturing Vaseline Glass from 1943 until November 1958. In 1959, when companies could resume making the glass, the expense and tight regulations of uranium dioxide limited production.

Editor’s Notes: I like poems that embed layers of meaning. Here, the fact that the Vaseline glass jar is an artifact becomes part of the driving force in the poem. Collectors go looking for these artifacts—even individuals who are not compelled by connections to life stories. If I were giving advice, I would say to a poet, “Artifacts carry meaning. Tell me the many ways an artifact speaks to you.” CAS

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Lepenski Vir, Europe’s Oldest Urban Settlement
sonnet
Vivian Finley Nida

On Danube’s bank, eight thousand years ago,
a settlement was planned, Lepenski Vir.
A whirlpool there snatched fish out from the flow
but could not steal them back from hook or spear.
More tools in hands built houses, all the same.
The trapezoidal floor was hard, no doubt.
Mixed clay, limestone, dung, ash could take hot flame
in hearths that cooked and kept the wild beasts out.
In every house were idols carved like fish
with open mouths turned down on heads of stone,
and like a leaping fish arched in a swish,
all hands in homes lift toward one shrine alone—
left bank’s giant rock where bolts of lightning thrill
and double sunrise burns the winter chill.

Poet’s Notes: The site of Lepenski Vir in eastern Serbia on the right bank of the Danube was discovered August 30, 1960 on a local farmer’s land. The Iron Gage Hydroelectric Power Station was set to flood the region with its artificial lake, so archaeologists explored as much as possible before 1971 when the site was moved to higher ground to avoid flooding.

Romania is on the left bank of the Danube. That’s where the giant rock, Trescovat, stands. Its trapezoidal shape gave the inhabitants of Lepenski Vir the idea for the shape of their houses, and its double sunrise was the start of their solar calendar. In 2024, a team went there to check, and they confirmed that the double sunrise still appears to mark the summer solstice.

In 2022, I was fortunate to tour Lepenski Vir inside the Đerdap National Park, a UNESCO global geopark. If you have the opportunity to see the site in person, I highly recommend it.

Editor’s Notes: Such an interesting approach to the theme of artifact—a whole urban community! Just two days ago, I saw a town that screamed artifact to me. What once was a thriving village because of the presence of a mineral spring is now only a collection of houses, businesses, and a hotel in decay. Ghost towns take us into the past, and the ghosts still walk in our imaginations. CAS

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Inheritance

free verse

Tyson West

Cousin Marcia grabbed the rosary beads

Grandpa and his guardian angel carried as Czar's army draft dodgers

across north Atlantic sea sickness and lonely teen

angst to Massachusetts marriage,

funerals for four infants in the Great Depression and

his happy death before I walked for my BA.

Instead, I was graced by his crude oak framed yellowing print of the black and white virgin

and her infant son handing Saint Simon Stock the scapular

she repurposed from Elijah's and Elisha's hand me down mantle.

In Spanish and French, inscriptions beneath Simon's vision

proclaim her protection to the wearer of coarse wool on bare skin.

I had first seen this print at fourteen when my idea of God shapeshifted

from a child's garden of frosted flakes, tooth decay, and gradations of sin

and guilt to a rainbow tapestry woven in technicolor doubts and testosterone jolts.

Grandpa's lair lay on the second floor of their creaking house.

Alone and colder, he dreamed away from Grandma's bedroom

off their kitchen's great Monarch wood cook stove

she tended with more tenderness than her sons' sire.

Graduating from smart ass college kid to

high plains agnostic, my insecurities

slept without fear in my dead ancestor's bed.

Under icy sheets slowly warmed with body heat from cells sharing his DNA

wrapped in the thick hide of Army blankets and a carpet pad scrap

where his dreams had grown old,

my dreams kept focus on the print of the Goddess and her godling giving hope

to an OCD Saint whose historicity rivaled Robin Hood and King Arthur.

Later, like Mary, Grandma gave me that print with its chipped varnished frame

and water stained lower-left corner not because I asked

but because she sensed her grandson shared the same visions

as the man she mixed genes and joy and loss with

but never loved.

This sole relic from one strand of my DNA braid survived decades

of women with whom I share children

but who never loved me

and women who covered me in the scapular of their passion

and left me childless yet

swirl still tightly in deepest recesses of feelings left

in the flow of days for which God will judge me.

This crude print does not teach divine nor carnal love

but each time I see it, I give thanks I have learned to treasure

unanticipated showers of grace combusting within me.

Not always have Grandpa and I loved wisely

but we survived well.

Poet’s Notes: My paternal grandparents lived in a house on an acre of flat ground at the end of Concord Avenue in Norwood, Massachusetts. My grandfather purchased sometime this home around the beginning of World War 1. He came to this country in 1906 on board a German steam ship to avoid being drafted into the Russian army. He and my grandmother lived in this house until his death in 1971 when, without explanation, my grandmother gave me the cheap black and white print in a rude oak frame that hung in my grandfather's upstairs bedroom. I have no idea where she or my grandfather got it, or any of the history behind it. I can only speak of what it means to me.

Editor’s Notes: I keep seeing the image of the crude black and white print in the oak frame, of the Virgin Mary handing the wool garment, a relic, to the English saint. I can understand how such a vision could burrow into a person’s psyche. CAS

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Pipe Dreams

free verse

Tyson West

I remember most strangely the briarwood pipe

he caressed with slices of Edgeworth tobacco from

its blue and gold package printed in 19th Century fonts.

A small thin man whose straight razor and mustache cup

found him every few days.

His large nose sat sovereign over his acre of thin soil north of the railroad track

that Google Earth tells still holds its course.

The ground he and grandma enriched

with wood ash, compost, and cow and chicken droppings,

and groomed clean over half a century of smooth glacial stones

into fine dark matrix that nourished cabbage, squash, and

the sweetest strawberries I've ever tasted

now greens a lawn for the duplex developed

after Grandma died and Danny, their youngest, suddenly

heart attacked off that humid green July golf course day.

When I was the same age as you, my granddaughter,

I sat on a stool in his brown hermitage

the barn with weathered wooden doors and unpainted, plank floors

rutted with years of August rising to shovel

cows' droppings into the mushroom cellar below.

He held court away from Grandma's yells

puffing on that pipe lit with great kitchen matches

his thumbnail struck in one hand.

Summer flies would circle the bare lightbulb

even as his puffs of fragrant smoke

rolled up blue to perfume the atmosphere we shared.

He would sip a glass of warm Ballantine ale at times,

and I could, with care, ask questions

he would parry with few words or a smoke ring.

I could never tell if he left Lithuania with regret or

which of the seven deadly sins he most cherished.

He missed the Kaiser's war, but found tobacco and Grandma

who never let him smoke in the house

but encouraged her sons to light up at her kitchen table.

Smoke swirled around him for a half century

until lung cancer he never had diagnosed

left his pipe cold and the barn chair empty.

Like seashells in the grave of a mountain king or

the unlit candle next to the portrait of a princess

symbols around him glow opaque.

Did he boil with resentment towards his father

of whom he never spoke?

Did he despise his wife's dramatic disrespect?

As he watched his sons who all returned from big war

and their children boom and vector away

did he appreciate this strange fruit his seed had nurtured?

A strange old man flickered before me, a slice of the old country,

worn with factory work in my childish present

quiet of his past and unworried of the future.

He cut wood for the stove, tended his garden,

and rolled his thoughts into burley tobacco between arthritic fingers

and with the magic of a Diamond match blazing above the bowl

raised clouds of smoke I have yet to penetrate.

Poet’s Notes: One of my sharper memories of my paternal grandfather was his pipe smoking. I would sit with him at the barn where he smoked, because my grandmother would not allow him to smoke in the kitchen. In our simple conversations, he never spoke much of his past nor the future. In a sense, this is an ekphrastic poem of my memories of my grandfather, reminiscent of Van Gogh's paintings of "Head of a Peasant with a Pipe."

Editor’s Notes: As strong poetry often does, this poem defies easy categorization. Truly, it is not ekphrastic, yet I understand West’s reference. West paints a picture, one full of poignant echoes. The poem also does not hit the theme of artifact squarely on the head, for the briarwood pipe is not an object the speaker holds and cherishes. The poem walks in memory, but the memory is alive with things, and those elusive and enigmatic things are no more. CAS

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The Photographer
—The day after the Battle of Antietam
free verse
John C. Mannone

He rolled in with his
wagon full of chemicals
and cameras, and caught
the soldiers lying dead
still, though he might
have moved some into
more dramatic poses
or arranged the bodies
in front of the church
as if he were a poet
working with the line
of soldiers. The Union
dead lined up like imagery
at the base of cannons
on their wheels, muzzled
in quietness, but for
the buzzing of flies. He’d
shoo them away, ironic
respect for the fallen—
those shocked, gray or blue,
by the barrage of lead, or iron
from the throat of cannons—
the scent of sulfur lingered
with the stench, decomposing
flesh from yesterday’s hell—
fire and smoke, and bodies
now perfectly composed.

Poet’s Notes: The Battle of Antietam was fought on September 17, 1862. It was the bloodiest single-day battle in the Civil War where there were at least 23,000 American casualties (and maybe as high as 28,000). It was this war to be the first largely reported with photography. Alexander Gardner and James Gibson were the photographers at Antietam. They worked for Matthew Brady who shocked the world with those photographs.

Editor’s Notes: This poem lies as quietly on the page as the dead lay on the battlefield. Like the bare limbs of winter trees shock the senses, so the taut lines of this poem say so much in their black-and-white starkness. CAS

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Artifact
free verse
Charles A. Swanson

Bobbi waited, a large inviting smile
wreathing his Israeli face. Samples,
free gifts, enticements, he had them,
bequeathed them, coaxed us to try
treatments. My wife, shrewd woman,
pulled my arm, tried to scurry along,
nonchalant and disinterested. But I,
I was swept into the brightly lit shop,
to a treatment chair where a mirror
held to my wrinkles and puffy eye-bags
showed me what I already knew.

Ah, what quick streambed current of talk,
what kind eyes and earnest teeth,
what smooth and taut skin, what
Israeli graciousness in English tongue,
though I missed every second, third,
fourth quick word. Fast, but no cost,
not yet. The serum worked, instantly,
as attested. I could feel the flesh
harden like marble, the magic happen
right below my eye. When Bobbi
gave me my two eyes in his handy-dandy
reflection glass, one eye, untreated,
sat in its sea-bed of blue, puffy ripples,
the other lay calm, unruffled, settled
in a pool of temporary tranquility.

Ah, Bobbi, I can’t pay your price!
Ah, Bobbi, I wish you luck! Your
kind face will sell bottles! But, Bobbi,
I only wish for the photographer
who wants a picture of old age,
of wrinkles, of eye-bags, of thinning
hair, of me, a throw-back to days
before collagen and Botox and facelifts,
a picture of an out-of-doors, sun-worn,
wind-blemished, seasoned survivor,
like a weathered, overlooked artifact
in a field of fresh-faced daffodils.

Poet’s Notes: C. S. Lewis once described himself as an old “dinosaur,” and I have often applied that metaphor to myself. My ways are old ways. And, more than likely, I defy full adaptation to my changing environment. I also chuckled when I read this definition of “artifact” from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary: “something or someone arising from or associated with an earlier time especially when regarded as no longer appropriate, relevant, or important.” I strive for relevance, but I leave that assessment to the young, and, maybe, to posterity.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Photograph by Gail Swanson

The Grinding Stone
free verse
Charles A. Swanson

The chill of rushing water
I know, pounded by roaring
currents, abradings that took
long and countless years, patience.
The brown red of river stone
you cherished, a shape you loved.

Your seamed hands brought me strongly
from booming waters. The stream
continued to shout as you
carried me away. The corn
you cracked and stamped against me
mixed with morsels of fine grit.

It was substance of mountains
you put in your mouth, the smell
of strong waters, the hard jolt
of earth’s rock-old foundations.
It was ancestry, oneness
with mother earth’s ancient past

you celebrated. With each bite
of bread, you bit a mouthful
reminding you, an old people
were young in the long leaf-fall,
whispered tongues, of the mountains,
rivers, you loved and tasted.

Poet’s Notes: Through many of my formative years, I lived on a Tidewater farm in Prince George County, Virginia. The fields, and one low hill in particular, must have hosted an Indian encampment sometime in the distant past. We found many arrowheads, a tomahawk or two, and a few grinding stones. Most of the grinding stones were round, worn smooth by water, and carried from a riverbed somewhere. We could tell a stone used for grinding grain because of the bowl-like depression made from pounding one rock against another. The grinding stone, the mortar, was easy to identify when we lucked across one. The pestle, the stone used for pounding, was harder to find. Only when we could feel the impressions left by an Indian’s fingers in the stone could we be sure. I’ve often marveled to think how many times, how many years, an Indian had to hold the pestle for the acid in his (or her) fingers to wear away the rock.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Photographs by Terri L. Cummings

Artifact discovered by Terri L. Cummings

approx. 640 AD

(in an unstratified area) on an archaeological dig

Caesarea Maritima, Israel, July 1976

Impression

Caesarea Maritima, Israel, July 1976

free verse

Terri Lynn Cummings

I touch my eyes

and wonder if they were stolen

by a foreign god

or my vision switched with that

of another, like a cat, maybe

or a simple sparrow spying

on the young Arab assisting

his master by a potter’s wheel.

I watch him work a red clay

pot handle onto a water jug’s body.

It’s tricky and he’s clumsy.

“A seamless marriage takes practice,”

says the master.

The boy lets his pot air-dry

until leather-hard

then stacks it with others

in a kiln that bakes the lot—

about 800 degrees Celsius

maintained for three days and nights.

When cooled, he retrieves his amphora

runs a finger over the roughly attached handle

fills the pot with fresh water and carries it

to old King Herod’s hippodrome

where he places it in a storeroom

with other vessels of water and wine

well below the spectator’s stone stands.

Bets, cheers, and groans

dim in the cavern’s shade.

Salty air over the Western Sea*

bordering the racetrack

cools the kiosk’s refreshments.

Arab horses have replaced the Roman ones

and simple horse races replaced the grand

gladiatorial games and Christian spectacles

so popular with the infidels before

the Arab soldiers drove them out.

Yet the kiosk works the same.

Women fill cups and hand them to boys

who carry them up to those

who did not bring their own drinks.

Men catch coins tossed in payment

and drop them in a slotted box

guarded by a big chested man.

Some coins get lost beneath

the shuffling feet or roll down

the steps to sand that buries them

where they wait to be discovered

centuries later, like the amphora

in the kiosk, now broken into shards.

In a deep trench, I kneel

flick sand and dirt from an object

grab a brush and go to work.

A pot handle emerges

crudely fashioned

onto the outer wall of what was

an amphora.

I draw it from the earth

and turn it over, clean the back side

uncover four imprints. Fingerprints!

I place my fingertips on them

and am enlightened by this person

who lived and loved and worked

almost 1400 years ago.

* aka Mediteranean Sea

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Guest Poets

Photograph by John Delaney

Reindeer People
free verse
John Delaney

In the woods near the shore of Khövsgöl Lake,
they had pitched their tents. Domestic reindeer
grazed nearby. I don’t know what we expected
to see: herders dressed in deerskin outfits?
But not a little blonde girl whose father
wore a blue Gap sweatshirt. And then there was
a solar panel set up on the ground.

They came down from the Taiga for supplies
and to earn a welcome tourist dollar.
A familial group, they were all young
and energetic, answering questions.
Strips of meat hung down near the stove to dry.
Their pet calf’s horn was velvety and warm.
The larger herd was off in the forest.

Most of what I saw were carvings of deer
on deer antlers. Carefully crafted, dear.

Poet’s Notes: The nomadic and settled Dukha populations only total about 500 people. The last of the Mongolian reindeer people, they receive small monthly subsidies from the government because of the importance of their centuries-old ethnic traditions.

We were surprised to see such young people continuing the nomadic lifestyle of their ancestors. And yet Mongolia has so many different nomads—of horses, camels, and yaks—and such large open spaces (steppes, Gobi Desert) to live, that we should have expected this in the land of Genghis Khan. So unique and special and inspiring.

Editor’s Notes: Perhaps a person or a people group may willingly choose to be seen as an artifact. Such a choice is one type of resistance to a world that is changing at light speed. Delaney’s poem helps us investigate how we may label and stereotype individuals. CAS

About the Poet: John Delaney’s publications include Waypoints (2017), a collection of place poems, Twenty Questions (2019), a chapbook, Delicate Arch (2022), poems and photographs of national parks and monuments, and Galápagos (2023), a collaborative chapbook of his son Andrew’s photographs and his poems. Nile, a chapbook of poems and photographs about Egypt, appeared in 2024 and Filing Order: Sonnets in 2025. He lives in Port Townsend, WA.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Legends
free verse
Sean Whalen

Today I saved a yellowed plat map
from a neighborhood rummage sale box
marked ‘Landfill Bound’

it called to me in the same voice
that keeps old shoes old shoes
or lost loved ones safe in old shoeboxes

and though I thought I knew the way
I let it guide me down dirt ways shadowed
with ruts from horse carts and steel lugged tractors

followed the legend to Fairchild School
searched a cottonwood grove shedding leaves
over buried primers and a rusted iron bell

listened at a dry well head that whispered
we know where they have gone
turned down Oak Road but it had turned to rows of corn

looked for homesteads indicated by black squares
leaned against the cool falling bodies of cars
rolled to rest behind the gravestones of barns

hiding sunken foundations in a vanity of grass
walked the half-mile down a muddy lane
to Swede Bend Church

genuflected at the chapel of bricks attended by mice
stood where the spire and setting sun
marked the land with a broken cross

recited the Lord’s Prayer to a meadowlark
who forgave me when I had trouble
recalling all of the words

wandered home built a fire sent the map to the stars
sparks glittering in the eyes
of those who followed

Editor’s Notes: This poem was the first one I read for this issue. It delighted me and continues to do so. One of the many things I admire is Whalen’s wise choice to avoid punctuation in a poem full of paths and structures that are disappearing. CAS

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Zenith

free verse

Sean Whalen

The rusting sign grown into the tree proclaims

Before Digging Call Northwestern Bell Operator Zenith 1234

in black letters on yellow once sharp as a ring

from a brass clapper, now rheumy.

I place an ear to the cold metal. A lost party of callers,

trapped and vibrating in the underground cable

radiates through the antenna of post and sign and oak,

arches to the universe, aches to be picked up by a satellite

so the journey can continue, messages can reach those

for whom they were intended, affirm loss and love,

confirm we are not forgotten, we are waiting

for hello, waiting for voices to be joined.

Editor’s Notes: Intriguingly, artifacts lie all around us. They are not just the ones we excavate in an archeological dig. I like poems that help us see an artifact as any remnant that takes us into a past way of living and understanding the world. CAS

About the Poet: Sean Whalen lives in rural Boone County, Iowa, where he finds inspiration close to home. He is a retired health and safety professional, active volunteer fire chief, and alumnus of the Iowa State University master’s program in Creative Writing. Recent poems have appeared in multiple publications, including Last Leaves, The Ocotillo Review, Unbroken, New Feathers, Stone Poetry Quarterly, Thimble, Assignment Magazine, MMOJ, and are forthcoming in The Avenue Journal, Right Hand Pointing, and The Chiron Review.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Found! A Roman Knife Handle
rhyming couplets
Paul A. Freeman

Oh, minion of mighty Mars, you’ve lain
submerged beneath the Tyne through sun and rain
millennia, a brazen figurine,
your gladiatorial details still pristine.
Behold, your chest-high shield that took the brunt
of spear and sword and trident in the hunt
for glory in arenas far from home -
Britannic amphitheatres under Rome.
Just inches tall, once handle to a knife,
you’re celebrated as a man whose life
depended on a politician’s thumb
to yea or nay the executioner’s drum.
Yet what besotted Venus had you cast
into this keepsake? Did she hold you fast,
or delve beneath your blood-stained armour so
she’d bear a sturdy infant child who’d grow
in freedom, not enslaved? No tongue can tell.
In mortal combat, probably you fell
(your visage masked within a cupric helm),
an emblem of the ancient Roman realm.

Poet's Notes: Hoping perhaps to piggyback on the cinema release of the film Gladiator 2, English Heritage touted the story of a Roman knife handle, carved in the likeness of a gladiator, found in the River Tyne. The historical possibilities behind this find were too tempting. I just had to cobble together a few mock heroic couplets on the subject after seeing the BBC's interview with Dr Frances McIntosh and hearing her take on the artifact.

Editor’s Notes: Freeman shared the link to this intriguing article where a picture of the Roman knife handle may be viewed: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn01g6dgywjo. I like how Freeman called his couplets “mock heroic.” Perhaps all our efforts to immortalize greatness are mock. Perhaps the distance of the River Tyne from Rome is a clue to how far we are from greatness. CAS

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The Mission

iambic quatrains (ABAB)

Paul A. Freeman

Our mission - to discover signs of life

amongst the stars – seemed destined to succeed;

for though our sun-strewn galaxy was rife

with barren orbs, our probe commenced to feed

our mother ship with data that portrayed

a double-planet’s larger sibling as

a place where fast-evolving beasts once stayed

before their air was radioactive gas -

a toxin-laden, stormy atmosphere,

through which a ruined cityscape we viewed,

till heat and rads destroyed our spacecraft’s gear.

We saw no blue, nor green that life imbued.

Our captain was uncertain if this proof

of aliens would be accepted by

our home-world leadership as gospel truth,

or else dismiss it, labelling it a lie.

To guarantee our bonuses, we scanned

the lesser of those planets, where a thing

of manufactured metal graced its bland

grey airlessness. We made a vow to bring

this artifact back with us, which would prove

our honesty and quash the envious claim

of fakery, to finally remove

all doubt we’re not alone - and seal our fame.

The vessel sent, brought back a steely plaque

that creatures from the big world left behind

upon their moon, while pledging to the black

of space, ‘We came in peace for all mankind’.

Poet's Notes: “The Mission” is based on a 2,600-word short story I wrote forty years ago as an undergraduate, titled (wait for it!) “The Artifact.” It was never published, I hasten to add. On spotting that the spring theme was 'Artifacts', I recalled the plot of my story, and realising how much more relevant its message is today, wrote it up as a 200-word poem.

I hope that doesn't count as cheating. It felt rather serendipitous (I've always wanted to use that word!).

Editor’s Notes: Shades of Saki! Freeman set me up beautifully for the irony at the end of the poem. CAS

About the Poet: Paul A. Freeman is an English teacher. He is the author of Rumours of Ophir, a crime novel taught at ‘O’ level in Zimbabwean high schools and which has been translated into German.

In addition to having two novels, a children’s book and an 18,000-word narrative poem (Robin Hood and Friar Tuck: Zombie Killers!) commercially published, Paul is the author of scores of published short stories, poems and articles.

He is a member of the Society of Authors and of the Crime Writers’ Association, and has appeared several times in the CWA’s annual anthology.

He works and resides in Mauritania, Africa.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Taking Aim

free verse

John Reinhart (former Frequent Contributor)

Nobody burned or tortured

on bicycle spokes, no mustaches drawn

on superstars, decreasing their value

by making them look more like they were

from the 80s, no, my baseball cards

were neatly executed by my mother.

Lined up for the firing squad,

practiced precision: Canseco, Clark,

Palmeiro, Sierra, Clemens, Yount,

Smith, Eckersley, Molitor, Sabo,

trespassers into our lives, a class

of thieves intent on stealing

childhood, long after I’d forgotten

them, mother stood them up

to shoot them down, neat holes,

like fastballs through cardboard.

That was the second time the cops

warned her about shooting in the backyard,

neighbors, you know, and accidents happen,

and she’d moved on from targeting

squirrels, which she claimed moved in

with development, a plague of human

territoriality. She’d tried alka seltzer tablets

instead, heard the fizz would explode

their little stomachs, though most of them

proved smarter, licking off the peanut butter

and discarding the tasteless tablet, maybe

burying it for winter, the indigestion

of worms.

Sometimes I think of those guys,

so many trying to cut corners

while I meticulously preserved their cardboard,

all the dreams left behind with our mothers.

Poet’s Notes: I wonder if Paul Molitor collected baseball cards. Did his mother collect baseball cards of her son? Did she frame them like family photographs? Did they adorn the mantel? Did his father keep a foldout collection of Molitor baseball cards in his wallet - Molly through the years? What is it about pictures of men on paper that we find so fascinating, trading some for groceries, collecting others in plastic sleeves? Why don't we go back to trading goats for rutabagas? Why don't we print papers with turnips on them and exchange those? Maybe the Molitors wallpapered their house with baseball cards, gluing them one to another until they leaned out the window, forming a bridge to other houses owned by baseball-playing families going right back to Garden of Eden, that unruly diamond yet to be mown, where Paul Molitor practiced hitting apples into the starry sky.

Editor’s Notes: Reinhart gives us another poem in his “Poet’s Notes.” How delightful. I expect quite a few mothers would like to “execute” some of the memorabilia—the trivia—that lies in the storage tubs of their children’s childhood. On the other hand, how could they bring themselves to terminate such memories? CAS

About the Poet: One of the original frequent contributors at Songs of Eretz, John Reinhart is a time traveling arsonist and editor of Star*Line, the quarterly journal of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association. His poetry free ranges from zombie gnomes in space, to tributes to Roberto Clemente, and verses about the people who encircle him. He is also the editor of Poetry Across Maine, a statewide documentary poetry project (www.poetryacrossmaine.com). Find more of his work at http://home.hampshire.edu/~jcr00/reinhart.html and https://www.patreon.com/c/johnreinhart

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Half Life
free verse
Michael Victor Bowman

The shade drifts towards you,
a human-form wisp of smoke.
A sibilance in your ear
is a faint voice. Moisture
beading on your skin
is not sweat, but the body
of this lost soul disintegrating.
It wants to embrace you,
to tether itself to you,
because one more trip
will be the end. And
it cannot resist
just one more
trip.

One week ago, you take her picture on your phone,
then take her hand. Her grasp is firm, confident.
She smiles. ‘See you soon.’ And she is gone.
You drop your hand, left stupidly hanging, and
your gaze falls upon the artifacts. No wonders,
these: no preserved heirlooms, just mundane things.
The trash of yester-year which archaeologists exhume,
examine, describe and base entire careers upon.
With one important difference: these things are fresh,
new, like they were made yesterday, with perishable details
in biodegradable materials that no peat bog or permafrost
could ever preserve. Why? Because these things were made
yesterday.

She is there, again, as if she had never left,
holding towards you a Sumerian urn.
‘For you,’ she says, ‘for your thesis.’
You accept, blushing and excited,
but you notice something is missing.
She seems… faded. Her voice quiet. Skin
pale, her smile more like a memory.
‘Where now?’ you ask.
‘To watch them erect Stone Henge,’
her whispered reply.
‘Wait,’ you say but, she is gone.
You are left with your urn
and your unspoken worry. ‘Don’t go
too far back. You’re leaving yourself
behind.’

Five days and hundreds of finds later, you’re looking
at that picture. And the one you took the day after.
And the next. In each, the room grows more cluttered
with revolutions in our understanding of history.
And in each, the figure in the midst of it is… less.
In the last picture only the eyes still burn in an almost
translucent face, illuminated from within by a collector’s zeal.
She cannot stop. Is it worth it? Your finger strokes the keen,
fresh edge of an arrowhead, flint-knapped just this morning
by a neolithic man. It draws a bead of red. As if summoned
by your blood offering, she is there and now even the eyes
are dull. She is there, but not there. She is almost gone.
The last thing you feel is her body falling upon yours
like a cloud of mist, before the air conditioning
blows it away, dispersing it
among the artifacts.

Editor’s Notes: Not to diminish the rest of the poem, but I find the description of artifacts in the second stanza such a well-put description of how artifacts can be understood. Artifacts themselves might be considered as having half-lives. The comparison to the lingering effects of radiation is tantalizing. CAS

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

seed bank

1879, a Shovel and an Idea

free verse

Michael Victor Bowman

One hundred years before my birth,
a man buried a glass bottle
in the Michigan earth. Within it
he had trapped the only beings
to evade entropy: to achieve,
by our meagre measure, immortality.
These beings became a vessel
that carries forward a question
that only philosophers yet to be born
might answer. So began a legacy
spanning centuries.

Dormant seeds may outlast many
generations of hole-digging
hairless apes until they are exposed
to 'favourable conditions' when
temperature, moisture and acidity
feel right - time starts again
for these intrepid, yet unaware, time
travellers. For them, a culture is not
art or history, philosophy or reason:
it is a substrate. They would use
the contents of the greatest libraries
as food not for the soul, but to nourish
their sendentary bodies. Their legacy
is not knowledge, it is continuity.

Are we jealous of these dreamless husks
that live on while our creativity
and inner life must die with us? Or
is it that we yearn to connect
with those that will come after us:
to be remembered? They say
plant a tree that you will never
sit beneath: ask a question to which
you will never know the answer.
Pass on the baton of knowledge
to the relay of inquiring minds
that will come, after. This is how
advances in knowledge are made.
This is the only way that mere
mortals can seed themselves
into the future.

Poet’s Notes: In 1879 Professor William Beal conceived of a 100 year experiment to test how long seeds could be kept before they would no longer be viable. In the grounds of Michigan State University he buried 20 glass bottles containing a variety of seeds. One bottle was to be exhumed every five years and the contents planted.
After the first bottles had been tested it was noted that almost all the seeds were germinating into healthy, normal plants, so the interval was gradually extended to 20 years. This means that the experiment will not now come to an end until the year 2100.
William Beal planted the first bottle at the age of 46 and died in 1924, aged 91. He was never going to see the end of the experiment. The people who will have likely not yet been born.

Editor’s Notes: Immediately, I think of old seeds I’ve planted and hoped for germination. If one in one hundred sprouts, then a bit of the past has blossomed into the future. I have not, however, thought before of the philosophy of seeds. What a marvelously poetic idea! CAS

About the Poet: Michael Victor Bowman (www.michaelvictorbowman.com) is a biology graduate, was a bathroom salesman and is now a PhD candidate studying truth and lies in the AI era. The most exciting seven seconds of his academic life so far were being chased by an angry hippo in Tanzania. He has appeared in Star*Line and the Gothic Nature Journal, but he is still new to SpecPo [speculative poetry]. If you like his work, please leave a comment or find him on social media because, as Charles Buxton said, silence is the severest criticism.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Forsake the Ground

free verse

A J Dalton

Perhaps a human skeleton will one day take its place

in a museum for other species to gaze upon

and wonder what we were really like

before we were hunted to extinction,

just as I stand here considering

the Great Moa of New Zealand

which died out in some century

not long after the Māori settled that island.

Oh, how they prized the twelve-foot bird

for its decoratively bright and flightless ceremony

its feathers perfect to festoon cloaks

its hollowed skull a handy vessel

perhaps unsurprisingly

and its sweet flesh a seductive supper.

It was rumoured to be quick and leggy

and to kick savagely when cornered

ah, but not quickly enough

and not as savagely as us.

So I ponder when it will be our turn

to go the way of the laughing owl

and perhaps – not too soon – the kakapo

or whether we’ll head for the skies

or hide deep below to escape

the predators who come in their ships.

Editor’s Notes: Science fiction poets have shown up for this theme. I would not have predicted that. Dalton imagines how one day we might become the specimens—the artifacts—behind the glass. His use of the extinct Great Moa to help us look backward in order to look forward is an effective and colorful strategy. CAS

About the Poet: A J Dalton (www.ajdalton.eu) is a UK-based writer. He’s published the Empire of the Saviours trilogy with Gollancz Orion, The Satanic in Science Fiction and Fantasy with Luna Press, the Dark Woods Rising poetry collection with Starship Sloane, and other bits and bobs. He lives with his monstrously oppressive cat named Cleopatra.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Clinging to My Keyboard as Waves Crash over Me
free verse
William L. Ramsey

Nixon era editorials continue undulating on the waves
for a while, but soon enough the newspapers dip
beneath the surface and begin arching toward the sandy
bottom. Song fragments from The Byrds end suddenly,
like fingers pinching a vibrating cymbal. And the digital
moon’s gravity is not enough to rescue anything, to draw
it up with the tide to whiten on some litter strewn beach.
I throw everything overboard to try and stay afloat, tie-
clips, manuscript poems in cursive, typewriters, watches,
books, all of it sinking through seven levels of darkness.

Some of it rocks defiantly back and forth in the lavender
range, a rhythmic descent, deferring the inevitable, but
most of it in the purple merely slips resignedly down
in slow eccentric spirals, punctuated by intervals of random
tumbling. Is there some newfangled slang, I gurgle,
that can describe the lightless dance of undergarments,
woolen, long-sleeved, arms entangled in arms, flailing
sometimes in panic, other times gesturing as if to warn
away or beckon someone closer? What new acronym can
capture the extravagant corrections of a whale-bone corset?

Editor’s Notes: I love an extended metaphor. Ramsey’s lifeboat of modernity, as he throws out the debris of outworn artifacts, reads like a plea of desperation. What might he discard that one day he wants so desperately back? CAS

About the Poet: William L. Ramsey (he/him) is a Professor at Lander University in South Carolina. His poems have appeared over the last thirty years in Beloit Poetry Journal, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Louisiana Literature, Poetry Magazine, Poetry East, Poetry Northwest, The South Carolina Review, and Southern Poetry Review. He is the author of two books of historical scholarship and one book of poetry, Dilemmas, which is available from Clemson University Press.

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The mystery of the thermionic

prose poem

Richard Magahiz

Who else misses the glow of filaments in vacuum? Electrons rattling off a hot surface like songbirds who spot a shadow overhead, pell-mell through an evacuated gap down electrostatic gradients, ecstatic acolytes of a positively charged god they are powerless to resist while behind them swarms of others boil off to join the throng, without faces or bodies, plunging down steep canyon walls recklessly screaming as they quench themselves into ecstasies of longing hotter than human could bear.

Poet’s Notes: This poem had its origin in an old image I found on Flickr two years ago which strongly brought to my mind the idea of flying electrons.

Image from page 318 of "The American journal of science" (1880)

I wrote it out originally in free verse form but soon converted it to a prose poem rhapsody.

Editor’s Notes: I’ve read prose poems that stretch credulity. The leaps of logic astound. I’m astounded here as well, and yet I comprehend the logic in this scientific “rhapsody.” CAS

About the Poet: Richard Magahiz tries to live an ordered life in harmony with all things natural and created but one that follows unexpected paths. He's spent much of his time wrangling computers as a day job but now when he's not making music he is writing speculative and mainstream poems. His work has appeared at Star*Line, Dreams and Nightmares, Sein und Werden, Uppagus, Bewildering Stories, and Shoreline of Infinity. His website is at https://zeroatthebone.us/

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Atlas of Escape
free verse
B. Fulton Jennes

We did not vacation, my penurious parents and I:
we worked the garden, watched the sky, eschewed
all but plodding travel to school, church, work.

But with the contralto groan of a weighty drawer
pulled through a window of wood, I wandered freely
with maps sliced from the spine of National Geographic,
hoarded in the lair of my father’s desk.

Godlike, I observed the work of pyramid-building pharaohs,
watched the widening malignance of the Roman Empire,
heard the songs of whales on their vast migratory paths,
felt the impact of comets on the moon’s silver surface.

But here, here is my favorite, worn white and willing
at its creases, softened all over like a bed sheet
washed free of starch: a plotting of the ocean floors,
rendered in hues of blue and gray, fissured by fault lines,
blemished by colossal peaks still striving to break surface.

See there: the impossible depths of the Mariana Trench,
where single-celled creatures grow to the size of your fist,
a place where oxygen and light are no longer needed,
a place crushingly pressurized, black as any tomb,
a place where all bad things find their way to in the end,
a place so familiar I did not really need a map.

Editor’s Notes: I love how picturesque the artifact—the map—is rendered in Jennes’ hands. In a poem about an artifact, I long to see what the poet sees, and in Jennes’ poem I do. CAS

About the Poet: B. Fulton Jennes is an award-winning poet whose work has appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies, including CALYX, Comstock Review, december, Extreme Sonnets, Rust and Moth, SWWIM, and Tupelo Quarterly. In 2022, her poem “Glyphs of a Gentle Going” was awarded the Lascaux Prize; another poem, “Father to Son,” won the 2023 New Millennium Award. Jennes’s collection Blinded Birds received the 2022 International Book Award for a poetry chapbook. FLOWN—an elegy-in-verse to her late sister—was published by Porkbelly Press in 2024. Jennes is poet laureate emerita of Ridgefield, CT, where she directs the Poetry in the Garden series each summer as well as the monthly Poems from Connecticut’s Four Corners program online.

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Cuneiform Exercise Tablet

couplets

Salvatore Difalco

A child’s first scratch kicks off scribal education.

A reed stylus shapes a single wedge or sign

over and over on a flattened clump of clay,

accented by fingernails and fingerprints.

Just as a father’s love cannot be dulled,

the teacher’s harshness cannot be mitigated.

Triangles evidence improvement, beatings averted.

Hair-pulling forestalled. Toothmarks indicate

vexation or hunger, or quiet rebellion.

In time, the student scribe masters all signs

and pronunciations, listing gods and trees

and body parts in pursuit of perfect form.

Need we know what each scuff means?

Should we view them as script or a type of art?

And yet the student scribe leaves the tablet unsigned,

unaware of how and why posterity will fetishize it.

Poet’s Notes: I’m embarrassed to admit that a recent overconsumption of podcasts about ancient history, civilization, archaeology, paleontology, theology, etc, has kindled my interest in ancient artifacts and our contemporary analysis and interpretation of them—freighted as these pursuits are by any number of personal or external pressures—as poetic material. A seemingly everyday or mundane object such as an ancient exercise tablet can be analyzed (or poeticized) for any number of things beyond the meaning of the symbols or signs themselves, but I always wonder if we imbue too much significance in what they often appear to be: exercises.

Editor’s Notes: In all the poems I read for the artifact issue, only in this poem did I read the word “fetishize.” What an apt word for how we might treat the artifacts of a long-distant past! No matter what the worth of the object in its own time, it becomes a treasure when it survives centuries, or even millennia. CAS

About the Poet: Sicilian Canadian poet and author Salvatore Difalco has authored five books, including Black Rabbit & Other Stories (Anvil Press). Recent appearances in E-ratio, Third Wednesday and RHINO Poetry. He lives in sunny Toronto, Canada.

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arrowhead
cascade poem
Mark A. Fisher

along the sandy Mojave River’s banks
the sand remembers dusty millennia
footprints erased by the errant winds

there are places the water rises
forgotten and unseen
along the sandy Mojave River’s banks

where camped a hunting party
untold years ago
the sand remembers dusty millennia

a lost obsidian arrowhead
now all that remains
footprints erased by the errant winds

Poet’s Notes: Near the entrance to Afton Canyon in the Mojave Desert, underground rock forces the Mojave River to the surface for a couple miles. There is still a campground there.

Editor’s Notes: In this sparse poem, I hear the wind, I see the riverbed, I watch the arrowhead emerge before it is lost again. The arrowhead is as primal as the elements of nature. CAS

About the Poet: Mark A. Fisher is a writer, poet, and playwright living in Tehachapi, CA. His poetry has appeared in: Reliquiae, Young Ravens Literary Review, and many other places. His first chapbook, drifter, is available from Amazon. His poem “there are fossils” (originally published in Silver Blade) came in second in the 2020 Dwarf Stars Speculative Poetry Competition. His plays have appeared on California stages in Pine Mountain Club, Tehachapi, Bakersfield, and Hayward. His play Moon Rabbit won Audience Favorite at the Stillwater Oklahoma Short Play Festival in 2023. He has also won cooking ribbons at the Kern County Fair.

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General Submission

Green? With a White Ribbon?

free verse

William L. Ramsey

Yep. It was here. I was sawing boards in the garage

when I looked up, trying to remember a measurement,

and saw its reflection rocking, indecisive, confused

about which way to go, in my car’s rear window.

I didn’t understand at first. It had been so long. I had

grown distracted by all the graduate disarrays of love,

the need for additional shelving, insurance. So I stared,

hesitated, and it drifted onward into the driver-side

window, then up as if escaping through the sunroof.

I ran out and looked up and only then remembered.

Most folks get over it. Get another. Forget the first.

Is there a Freudian term for this?

Displacement maybe? Substituting more reasonable

objectives for doomed or injurious or unobtainable

ones? The desire remains. The thing desired changes.

Say what you will about me, kid, but I remembered

you wanted this. It was hovering about ten feet above

the roof’s ridgeline, the end of the ribbon still tied in

a loop. It floated across the yard into the trees where

we built your treehouse and I feared I might see how

the story ends: a bang and a whimper. But it blundered

through. I chased it a ways, thinking how great it would

be to grab it and give it to you at last and say here you

go, here it is, you can stop crying.

Editor’s Notes: This riddle poem, this “what-is-it?” poem, offers more than just the answer to the riddle. It also suggests elusive hopes and dreams, lost promises, as the central object escapes through the trees, leaving behind it disappointment and an ineffectual grab at something I might label as resignation. CAS

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Book Review

Concerning the Service

Clayton Spencer

Reviewed by Charles A. Swanson

Clayton Spencer’s chapbook, Concerning the Service, is now available through Beyond Words Press, a publisher in Berlin, Germany. Copies may be found at this address: https://www.beyondwordsmag.com/online-store/CONCERNING-THE-SERVICE-A-POETRY-CHAPBOOK-BY-CLAYTON-SPENCER-p716219106 The price is given in Euros, but the conversion is around $20.00, shipped.

Clay Spencer served as Associate Editor and Guest Art Editor for Songs of Eretz in 2024, and we are happy that he continues to experience success as his poetry reaches larger audiences. This little volume received the Beyond Words Chapbook Award in 2024. Clay is also the recipient of the 2024 ARTie Award for Excellence in Poetry from the Ohio Arts Council.

Spencer’s poetry strikes a tonal note, like the pitch of a tuning fork. From space to space, from image to image, from poem to poem, there is a pull like an undertow, or like the primal susurration of the drone of a Scottish bagpipe. The small trilogy of poems, three in number, each titled “Portrait of a Turned Back” speak this consistency. Despite the many, many images in poem after poem—images that do not peacefully lie on the page together—there is a consistency of emotional impact. This is a volume of lyrical verse, and it does not contain neatly packaged and ribboned poems. Instead, each poem is a movement, a current in a river of life, a flashing iteration of sparkle, of darkness, of sunlit and sunblind depth.

That the poems will not lie down and stay put is seen in many images. In the title poem, “Concerning the Service,” the speaker seemingly addresses his father with these words, “I am still right where you left me, / being carried to bed, asleep in my mother’s arms.” But these words are not the beginning nor the ending of the poem. They are tucked along many other flowing images, including, “I bring this sickly turkey with me everywhere I go . . . .” Like the water in a creek, the semantic current does not run smoothly; instead, meanings bash against rocks of obstruction. As the insistent voice leads us to believe, life does not happen in a neatly structured narrative. The beginnings are not clearly marked. The endings include elusive hope but little certainty.

This little volume will gift a lover of lyric poetry with much to dwell on. It is a sipping book of poetry, not a gulping book. One will not read it and walk away, saying “I’m full.” Instead, it will tempt the reader to return and taste some more.

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Frequent Contributor News

Current & Former FCs

Vivian Nida, an Oklahoma Writing Project Teacher/Consultant, served as the judge for high school prose entries from across the state in the 2025 Write to Win Contest for Oklahoma Students, sponsored by the Oklahoma Writing Project, a site of the National Writing Project.

Terri Cummings and Vivian Nida, members of the advisory committee of the Oklahoma City University Thatcher Hoffman Smith Poetry Series, helped finalize plans and will act as hosts at this year's 26^th annual event, featuring U.S. Poet Laureate, Ada Limón, Tuesday, April 1, 2025, 7:30 p.m., Kerr-McGee Auditorium, OCU Meinders School of Business, NW 27th and N. McKinley, Oklahoma City, OK.

Terri will host the Community poetry open mic at 6:30. Book signing to follow Ada Limón’s reading. Free and Open to the Public, but RSVP ticketing is required. To reserve seats or for more information: www.okcu.edu/film-lit .

The first print edition of Mary Soon Lee’s epic fantasy-told-in-poems "The Sign of the Dragon" was published in January 2025. It contains 40 wonderful illustrations by Gary McCluskey. 16 of the poems in the book were published in Songs of Eretz Poetry Review! Her webpage is https://thesignofthedragon.com/

Mary also had a guest post about "The Sign of the Dragon" up at The Future Fire: http://press.futurefire.net/2025/03/an-epic-in-verse.html

Her poem "William Carlos Williams's Cat" is in the February issue of Uppagus at https://uppagus.com/poems/soon-lee-williams/

Lauren McBride’s recent publications include her poem, "A Knight in the Morning,"genre, Penumbric, February, 2025.

https://www.penumbric.com/currentissue/mcbrideKnight.html

and poem, " Help Wanted: Reliable Muse," Storyteller Poetry Review, October 25, 2024.

https://stortellerpoetryreview.blogspot.com/2024/10/storyteller-poetry-review-pushcart.html

Charles A. Swanson has two poems in the most recent issues of AvantAppal(achia). “Wild Gatherings: A Little Tail Meat” appears in the Current Issue, Issue 16: https://www.avantappalachia.com/ And “Random” appears in the Special Issue, “Come Hell and High Water: Helene”: https://www.avantappalachia.com/special-issues.html

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Your Support

Songs of Eretz Poetry Review is a for-profit entity that operates at a loss of up to $7,000 per year. It is sustained entirely by donations of time, talent, and treasure from our editorial staff, loyal readership, and family of poets and artists.

Our four quarterly issues take hundreds of man-hours to produce. That is what it takes to offer our readers a quality experience and our featured and guest poets and artists a place where they may be proud to publish their work.

Please consider making a modest gift supporting our purpose, “to bring a little more good poetry into the world.” Those interested should use PayPal.com with Donations@SongsOfEretz.com as the receiving address.

Please note that contributions are not tax deductible.

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Forthcoming

In the Kitchen" theme -- what we are looking for

2025 Themes and Deadlines

(Please note the new submissions' address, both here and on our Guidelines page. The correct submissions' address is submissionssofe@gmail.com)

Some Guidance for the May "In the Kitchen" Submission Call (What We’re Looking For): The theme of the kitchen presents many opportunities, many directions and pathways. Some of the paths are not the most traveled ways, and that’s always fun for us as editors. As you’ll see below, some of the possible topics include foods, customs, kitchen talk, preparation, and teaching. The list could be much broader.

What I think of for a good kitchen poem in a good roux, or, in my upbringing, a tasty gravy. In fact, cook a pot of pinto beans just right, with a ham hock if you have it, and put that bean soup on a piece of biscuit. Now, that’s a good poem.

I’ll be more direct. Give complexity and fullness to your poem. Intrigue us. Help us to taste the wonder, even if your kitchen poem is about a family telling stories after the food is eaten.

2025 Themes & Deadlines

Season Theme Submission Period

~~Spring Artifacts February 1-15~~

~~(objects that carry history, memory, identification, such as message in a bottle from the past, etc.)~~

****

Summer In the Kitchen May 1-15

(foods, customs, kitchen talk, preparation, teaching, etc.)

***

Fall Digging August 1-15

(literal or figurative)

***

Winter Tension November 1-15

(literal or figurative, life situations, the push and pull, tension within the poem itself, the complexity of situations, etc.)

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SONGS OF ERETZ POETRY REVIEW

Songs of Eretz Poetry Review

Saturday, March 15, 2025