Persona

by Harriet Sohmers Zwerling

“She comes on drenched in perfume called

            Self-Satisfaction from feather boa to silver pumps.

Edward Field, Mae West

Her hair glows like the moon and her fiery lips have a cruel
turn that says I conquer!

She loves herself and expects you to …
While you are looking fearfully
in the bathroom mirror,
slathering your cheeks with cream,
plucking doubtfully at your eyebrows,
seeking a fuller shape for your lips,
she is queening it on the screen with men—
Cary Grant groveling in admiration before her
bountiful breasts and full white arms.

Truth is; you don’t have to be a beauty to rule!
You do have to burn with
sensual fever. You do have to empty your mind
of banality. You do have to be daring
and free of those antique prohibitions.
that kept us humble  You do have to imagine yourself
as the proud, conquering female of your tribe,
and never refuse an adventure.

 
Harriet Sohmers Zwerling: Ex-expatriate, ex-nude model, ex-school teacher. Forever hedonist, grandmother and of course, writer.

Bayscape

by Harriet Sohmers Zwerling

At first glance it is all one blue,
but nearer, you see the
indigo above, the teal below.
A pale ocher line divides them
into two unequal parts,
sky above, bay below,
the town wharf between.
Light from somewhere paints
the facades of the boat house,
the cold storage, the office.
And lined up along the pier
are the tiny fishing boats,
like wispy mosquitoes.

Judging from the darkness, a storm is coming.
That thick sky will soon glimmer with
lightning; the almost emerald water
leap with raindrops and
the pier disappear into the fog.

And I will be back at Beach Point
with you, love…

Harriet Sohmers Zwerling: Ex-expatriate, ex-nude model, ex-school teacher. Forever hedonist, grandmother and of course, writer.

To Barbara Tuchman

by Lucy Wollin

Despite you, we are
Refugees from history,
Lost
And out there in the stars
Spacemen adjust a bolt
And come back, wanting to
Ignore the news.

The Khmer Rouge threw doctors headless into pits
We do not hear the cries from the boneyards
Blind as a veteran’s thousand-meter stare
John Wayne is marching into El Salvador
Children are dragged from their parents screaming

We belly our ambushes into jungles
Men and women hide behind the giant ferns
Lobbing curses
Yankee so’jer you die tonight
And take our guns from us
And hang our ears from their belts
And paint their faces green

And so’jer you die
 
Despite fields of fire
Agent orange
Rumors of war
We are lost
And they are lost, too.

 
Lucy Wollin has been writing poetry on and off since she was able to write. Attending the Bread Loaf English School and Writers’ Conference helped her to focus and taking Sarah White’s IRP classes was a source of ideas as well.

Sweet Five

by Sarah White

Five o’clock
on a winter morning.
Half asleep
alone.

Five-year-old
Owen
at the door.

Bad dream,
Mom.
 
I mumble—
Crawl in …
It’s warm.

At dawn
he wakes,
stretches,
looks around,
remembers.
This
 is really living,
he exclaims.

 
Sarah White: Author of Cleopatra Haunts the Hudson (Spuyten Duyvil, 2007) and Alice Ages and Ages (BlazeVox, 2010), she is working on a collection of linked poems inspired by Dante’s Purgatorio.

To Her Gloomy Friend

With thanks to Will S.

by Elaine Greene Weisburg

Shall I compare thee to a winter’s day?
Thou art more turbulent and bleak
As icily you struggle to assay
The manifold resentments that you seek.

While oft December’s cruel gales subside
You ne’er permit tranquility to reign.
Daily disappointments do abide
To sate your endless appetite for pain.

For thee, alas, the winter will not yield
To gentle springtime’s optimistic green.
Your pessimism is your steely shield
And you will to an endless winter lean.

As seasons change for other eyes to see
Relentless gloom’s your perpetuity.

 
For more than three decades Elaine Greene Weisburg was an editor-writer at House & Garden and House Beautiful. Although also a memoirist, she only dared to try poetry in an IRP class.

The Cove

by Elaine Greene Weisburg

Elaine Weisburg, The Cove

Now I live alone but
the cove outside my window
keeps me company.
Talking on the phone,
I’ll say “The cove is like a mirror…
“There are whitecaps on the cove…
“Today the cove is frozen.”
It’s not just my view, it’s my news.

A hundred years ago,
they dumped their trash outside the door,
and in the cove, at tidal lows,
we’d rake out little bottles:
Moses Atwood’s Jaundice Bitters,
Swamp Root Kidney Remedy
—all fished out now, but the trove
sparkles in a window.

On the beach we’ve kept some boats,
the best my vintage wooden sharpie.
She skimmed along like a ballerina,
a breeze for the thief to slide into his truck.
The clumsy fiberglass successor
failed to win my backward heart.
But to dwell on the objects
and people I love
that are missing?
I try to make do with the cove.

 
For more than three decades Elaine Greene Weisburg was an editor-writer at House & Garden and House Beautiful. Although also a memoirist, she only dared to try poetry in an IRP class.

After Irene

by Charles Troob

Charles Troob, Summer Afternoon

Hot late-summer sun
beats down on the dying birch,
its three trunks split apart.

Forty feet in six years–
more a thick branching weed
than a dignified tree,
it had swayed in the breeze
like its aspen cousins.
Surely, I thought,
it would bend
and bounce back.

Vines, shrubs, flowers
enjoy an August day,
unaware.

We await the tree man
who will do what he does.
Then we’ll raise an umbrella
to replace the shade.

 
Charles Troob:  An eager member since 2010 of two wonderful study groups–Lessons in The Art of Writing, and Reading and Writing Poetry–Charles is grateful for the opportunity to share some of the results. 

 

Woad

by Charles Troob

When you take a tour around Toulouse
and the smaller cities in the sunny region
on the French side of the Pyrenees
the guides will tell you about woad, a plant
like spinach, used for a blue dye, fixed
(made colorfast) with urine, the source of
enormous wealth in the twelfth century
and later, until displaced by indigo.

“How interesting!” you think, for five minutes.
And then they tell you about the Cathars,
wiped out in the Albigensian crusade
of the thirteenth century, a horrible tale,
and one with greater bearing on today
than woad–though, to be honest, not by much.

 
 Charles Troob:  An eager member since 2010 of two wonderful study groups–Lessons in The Art of Writing, and Reading and Writing Poetry–Charles is grateful for the opportunity to share some of the results. 

Summer Afternoon

by Charles Troob

Along the margin of a bay
sailboats strewn like paper flags
skimmed and skated.

At helms and under masts
men and women
stretched their limbs
under July sun

as the joy of the breeze
on bones and sinews,
on jibs and shrouds
and scudding keels
revived a past
when schooners and sloops
and gales that propelled them
were the trucks and fuel
of this perilous coast

and the power and skill
to ride with the wind
meant food for your kids
and life through the winter
and you lived with the gods
of sea and air.

 
Charles Troob:  An eager member since 2010 of two wonderful study groups–Lessons in The Art of Writing, and Reading and Writing Poetry–Charles is grateful for the opportunity to share some of the results. 

My Mate

by Fred Shinagel

Eyes mist over with a memory:
Five years into her long decline,
still lucid and engaging,
she said, “why don’t you get married?”
“But I am married…to you”.
“You’re kidding…”

And then another five years
and a fleet of angels
claim her in her sleep.

 
Fred Shinagel: Retired from Wall Street, a neighbor of The New School for 49 years, a graduate of the Cooper Union and MIT, has again found expression via the right side of his brain with charcoal, pencil and poetry.