Poetry

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.

by Elaine Greene Weisburg

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.

by Charles Troob

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

by Howard Seeman

I look peeringly hard at the branches of the trees.

Finally, yes.

I was worried,
I do see little buds coming out.

I was afraid they wouldn’t come.

I am here again.
I have now gone through 69 winters,
and as these winters end,
I wait for those flowers
that danced for me,
and accompanied me on the side of my every walk

that then slowly withered and died…

to come again.

So many winters now
and so many springs.

So many that
I worry: maybe they are used up.

I am much more tired,
and more full of needing them to come again.

It is such a relief:
I was afraid they wouldn’t come.

 
Professor Emeritus, C.U.N.Y.; Life Coach at: E Coaching for Helping Professionals; Education Consultant on Classroom Problems at: Pro-Ed Media: Classroom Management Online; Published poet at: Howard Seeman’s Book of Poetry.

by Carol Schoen

The tree Betty gave us
for our fifth anniversary
is  grown now,
sweet cherries
a treat for finches,
blaze of gold darting
between green and red.

The peony bush collapsed,
weighed down by  pink
blossoms. The hostas thrive.

Day lilies, from the one
dug up at the roadside,
the year Joshua was born,
now line the fence.

They bloom
all through July,
but the black-eyed susans
were ripped out.

I heard all about it
from the woman
who lives there now.

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

by Carol Schoen

My grandfather’s grandfather
clock, tall and stately, imperious; elegant
hands; massive bronze weights; delicate Roman
numerals; a small moon in phase,
peeping from the face.

Weekly, my grandfather unlocked the case,
wound up the weights with a golden key, and swept
the hands to the proper time, checked against
his watch.  An awesome sight, my grandfather,
the lord of time.

The clock stood in my parents’ house
for twenty years. When my mother
passed it to us, we wound it, adjusted
the hands.  Fifteen minutes later
the chimes began.

Thirty minutes, twice as many chimes,
Twelve times at noon, twelve at midnight too.
It chimed when we were reading, eating, watching
TV, prompt, proclaiming its ability
to measure time.

It took a week for the clock to wind down,
never to be rewound, but the bronze
weights sagged on the cabinet floor,
the hands locked permanently at noon, moon
phases all out of sync.
Mother came to call.
Appalled at our neglect, stern
in retribution, she had it moved
to my brother’s home.  We had failed
to honor time.

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

by Carol Schoen

Articulate 
A tic or what
you ate
can make
you late,
but maybe
it will bring Art!
 
Knowledge
Only the
owl perched
on the ledge
edge
knows.

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