Poetry

Giving is Getting

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by Howard Seeman

So, here my dear daughter:
I give you this little money now for xmas.
But look what I get?
More Jaimelyn!
I got more Jaimelyn each time I gave you the bottle,
Or a tickle.
Or baby food making believe the spoon was an airplane into your mouth.
Telling you things that felt awesome to you,
or giving you the how to do quadratic equations.

As you grew into no-more-little-Jaimelyn.
Look what I got: big Jaimelyn.

Yup: giving is getting.
Here, with this letter to you: I do it again:
As I send it, I imagine your smile.
Ah, I Get !

Yup, giving is getting.
That is what you do up on stage: performing is giving-is-getting,
or listening to Andrew is
giving-is-getting.

And giving gets more getting than trying to get.

Here, in this little poem, pulling up more of me to do this giving to you,
I get: more me.
Ah, again: giving is getting.

I can feel you get this.
So glad you get it; this gives me a lot of GOT that you get it.
Now I get, you get, we get: we get GOT together!
A-fast-hugging-each-other-got.
Wow, what a wide got we got from such short little giving.

See? I’m right:
Giving is getting.

Howard Seeman, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, CUNY; Certified Life-Coach. Author of collected poems: “Unlike Almost Everything Else in the Universe” and Memoirs: “You/Me: Getting Under Limbo Bars”. In private practice at: [email protected]

Message

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by Carol Schoen

The girl walked into the overgrown
meadow, wheat-colored grass
concealing secrets.
And then she saw it:

sunshine spewing radiance
from the sign: Cornell Dubilier —
a whiff of college,
of great French artisans.

There is no value in explaining
that it is a company that makes
electronic capacitors —
the child knew she had found
a magical kingdom hidden right there
in the middle of New Jersey.

Carol Schoen wrote her first poems for Sarah White’s study group and has been chugging along happily ever since.

Hare Krishna

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by Carol Schoen

Twice exiled, not yet at home
in the park, the tree
remembers the dappled light
of India

remembers the prayers
the marigolds
orange and red
garlands strewn
among the fallen leaves

home now almost forgotten
in an almost forgotten park
but the faithful found it
prayers send from here
the hare krishna tree
a small sign pasted crooked

for fifty years
the hare krishna tree
they come here to pray

Carol Schoen wrote her first poems for Sarah White’s study group and has been chugging along happily ever since.

Cemetery

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by Carol Schoen

The cemetery cowers
in a corner of the office
park. Bought long ago
by immigrants uncertain
of eternity
it holds many neighbors,
my parents, the family doctor,
my aunt and her demented
husband, a teenage friend
whose presence always shocks me.

I check to see if the lawn
has been mowed, if the dead
juniper bush has been replaced.
A hole in the ground announces
a coming funeral. I do not
recognize the name. Finally
I go to my parents and stare
down at their gravestone, blankly.

Carol Schoen wrote her first poems for Sarah White’s study group and has been chugging along happily ever since.

Angel headed hipster

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by Carol Schoen

Calm down, Allen, the angel headed hipsters
are sleeping it off. The pot’s
all gone. Your momma’s
safe in that big sanitarium
in the sky and the Beat world blew
off in a puff of smoke. A century
of time disappeared in a cyber minute.
Right now, right here, there’s just you
and me, two Jews trying to figure out
where we fit in a techie’s algorithm.
Here, I offer you, not the clutch
of love but a little of that mother
you hated, loved and wanted.
Come to this clean, middle-class bed
and I will cuddle you and you will remember.

Carol Schoen wrote her first poems for Sarah White’s study group and has been chugging along happily ever since.

The Year the Government Changed

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by Mireya Perez

Conservatives hunted Liberals
don Pablo hides to safe passage
on a steamer to Havana
……………………………….la casa en Sincelejo
……………………………….oak-guarded
troops trample……………..cobblestoned streets
………………………………dona Eloida reposes
………………………………newborn sleep
………….solos …………….niños, muchachas
………………………………eleven-year old María
………….solos
………….hoof hoofs en la plaza
………………………………“Rapidó, rapidó, por aqui”
………………………………María directs the retreat
………………………………through mango grove
………………………………papayas and chickens
………………………………past the tamarind tree
………………………………flings Spanish bedspread
………………………………to cushion hoist
………………………………of mama, niños
………………………………al patio de don Eusebio
While in front a brave oak groans
smashed refuge

 

 

Mireya Perez-Bustillo, born in Colombia and raised in New York, writes poetry and fiction in Spanish and English. In her work she searches for that “other voice” breaking through entrapment and oppression, the fragile markers to unearth more hidden voices. Her work appears in Revista del Hada, Caribbean Review, Americas Review, Diosas en Bronce: Anthology of Colombian Women Writers, Vibe Viva, IRP Voices, among others. Her novel, Back to El Dorado, is forthcoming.

 

 

Ancahuita *

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by Mireya Perez

…………In 1960 “the butterflies,” the political
…………activists Mirabal sisters from the
…………Dominican Republic, were assassinated by
…………the order of Trujillo, “el jefe”.
…………Only Dedé survived.

Huita, huita niña
bark to plump blood
trumpet blooms borageous
to still pain of living
butterfly, Dedé
Ancahuita guards butterflies
gone Mate, Minerva, Patria
the broken bodies, the black car,
el jefe’s ire
las mariposas now one
Dedé to tell in Ancahuita refuge
Huita, huita, huita

* A common tree in the Dominican Republic, often used to mark a location

 

 

Mireya Perez-Bustillo, born in Colombia and raised in New York, writes poetry and fiction in Spanish and English. In her work she searches for that “other voice” breaking through entrapment and oppression, the fragile markers to unearth more hidden voices. Her work appears in Revista del Hada, Caribbean Review, Americas Review, Diosas en Bronce: Anthology of Colombian Women Writers, Vibe Viva, IRP Voices, among others. Her novel, Back to El Dorado, is forthcoming.

 

 

Poetry is…

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by Mary Padilla

Physics is what physicists do.
(Richard Feynman said this )
So poetry is…
up for grabs, perhaps, but
it does involve some constraints.
You need to use words.
Well, maybe not –
maybe just syllables
or even sounds.
It uses a verbal medium anyway
not a visual one – except
that there can be an impact
of how it looks on the page
and then there’s word-painting.
Is it like music then –
all about the rhythms
and the emphases
and the inflections?
Yes but
could it be more
about the spaces between the sounds
and the things left unsaid at the end?

 

Mary Padilla set out last semester to investigate poetry by signing up for two study groups on the subject.  When that wasn’t sufficiently clarifying the nature of the medium for her, being at TNS, the home of John Dewey, she tried learning-by-doing and attempted to write some of her own.

 

On Understanding

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by Mary Padilla

Van Gogh thought that he
“would be understood without words.”
We do think in pictures
when we think of some things.
Some of us do, anyway.
And most of us do think in words sometimes.
But as for being understood…
do we even understand ourselves?

 

 

Mary Padilla set out last semester to investigate poetry by signing up for two study groups on the subject.  When that wasn’t sufficiently clarifying the nature of the medium for her, being at TNS, the home of John Dewey, she tried learning-by-doing and attempted to write some of her own.

 

Experienced Brain Technicians

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by Mary Padilla

After poetry class
I drive home in a blizzard.
The van in front of me
says Experienced Brain Technicians.
I am thinking of Frank O’Hara
in whose world I just spent 90 minutes.
Maybe that is what poets are,
experienced…brain…
Five miles pass
some snow falls off
the B becomes a D
and I am following plumbers.
Still
there does seem to be technique
to poetry
and
it seems to come from experience
real or imagined.
I am a poet, he keeps saying
very much a poet.
Does he doubt himself so much?
Very much, I am a poet.
I am poet, very much.
A poet I am.
Am I?

 

 

Mary Padilla set out last semester to investigate poetry by signing up for two study groups on the subject.  When that wasn’t sufficiently clarifying the nature of the medium for her, being at TNS, the home of John Dewey, she tried learning-by-doing and attempted to write some of her own.