Tag: anniversary

Anniversary by Sydney Lea

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Anniversary

           …the pride and confidence of an absolutely invulnerable stupidity.
                     Stephen Crane, “The Blue Hotel”

When I look through the glass in our kitchen wood stove’s door,
and when I’m sufficiently tired, as I often am
in my later years, shapes can suggest themselves
and despite myself, I imagine they’re telling me something.

This morning, for instance, I made out a bouquet of flowers.
hot-orange dahlias, I thought, the kind my mother
started raising in her young widowhood.
Last evening after supper, I pictured a church

like the Roman Catholic one commanding a hill
above Lake Memphremagog, its architecture
elegant, a sign that you’re close to Québec,
where you’ll leave the Protestants’ plain white clapboard behind.

On some fairly recent day, I saw forked tongues
of fire, like the ones described in the Book of Acts
that told the disciples their words now bore the spirit
of God. But it isn’t Pentecost here. It’s winter.

These visions, to glorify them by such a name–
I wonder where they come from. What connects them?
I assume they must have something in common because
I’m the one, after all, to whom they present themselves.

I know that I must ward off self-importance,
that mine are not some prophet’s promptings,
no matter my wishes. My father died today
precisely sixty years back. I’ve mourned him since.

If my tongue were cleft and ablaze with godly power,
I’d speak to him. Maybe those wood stove flowers
(were they lilies, not dahlias?) and the spire on that looming church
are what brought his funeral to mind. Mere speculation.

It’s sad that everything’s speculation now.
It wasn’t always that way. There was a time
when in blissful arrogance, I fancied
that I could label all my world’s components,

interpreting each and every one exactly.

*

Sydney Lea is a Pulitzer finalist in poetry, founder of New England Review, Vermont Poet Laureate (2011-15), and recipient of his state’s highest artistic distinction, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. He has published two novels (most recently Now Look, 2024), eight volumes of personal essays (most recently, Such Dancing as We Can, 2024), a hybrid mock epic with former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate James Kochalka called Wormboy (2020), and sixteen poetry collections (most recently What Shines, 2023). His new and selected poems is due in early 2027.

Anniversary Song by Pauli Dutton

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Anniversary Song

Here’s to the man who shudders in staccato at the new sun.
A bandaged man, of 90 years, who soon after hip surgery,
carried his walker down the front steps and took out the garbage.
A man, who on our third date, handed me his Mensa card,
now asks the names of our grandchildren.
Before the wedding, I believed he could pen
an encyclopedia. A decade ago, his brain began its seep.
How he shook in the market deciding on ice cream,
shrieked at a dropped cup of coffee,
scolded a yellowed leaf on the rose tree.
Last year he screamed at line 54 of the 1040,
slapped the table again and again, roaring my name.
He thundered when I told him I’d made a date with a taxman,
then cried as he said, Thank you and asked,
Will you still be my wife? I touched his shoulder,
answered, Will you marry me?

*

Pauli Dutton is a former librarian. Her poems have appeared in ONE ART, Writing in A Woman’s Voice; Verse Virtual, Quill & Parchment, The Pangolin Review, Altadena Poetry Review; and Spectrum Anthology. Her poem While Teaching Line Dancing was nominated by ONE ART for Orison Book’s Best Spiritual Literature 2022. She was the featured poet in Quill and Parchment, December 2024.

An Anniversary Poem from Far Away by Keith Taylor

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An Anniversary Poem from Far Away

I know people who ache
to be away from home,
gone to far places, who
feel alive only if climbing
the walls at Rhodes
or watching puffins fly
off the islands in Maine.

But you, my love, have given
life a flavor that stays
with me when I travel
to Greece or Maine, that makes
me long for our kitchen
where I could make coffee
or wash yesterday’s dishes.

*

Keith Taylor has published poems in such places as Hanging Loose, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, and many others. He published two books in 2024: All the Time You Want: Selected Poems with Dzanc Books; and What Can the Matter Be with Wayne State University Press.

Three Poems by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

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In the Garden, Again

After breaking, after kneeling,
after raising my ripe fist, after
opening my palm, after
clenching it again, after running,
after hiding, after taking off
my masks, after stilling,
after shouting, after bargaining
with God, after crumpling
and cursing, after losing,
after song, after seeking,
after breath, after breath,
after breath,
I stand in the sunflowers
of early September
and watch as the bees weave
from one giant bloom to another,
and I, too, am sunflower,
tall-stemmed and face lifted,
shaped by the love of light
and the need for rain.
I stand here until some part of me
is again more woman than sunflower,
and she notices how,
for a few moments,
it was enough just to be alive.
Just to be alive, it was enough.

*

A New Kind of Conversation

It is possible to be with someone who is gone.
—Linda Gregg, “The Presence in Absence”

I have no phone receiver to connect me to the other side,
but every day I speak to my beloveds through candle flame.
Every night, I speak to them through the dark before sleep.
I speak to them in the car when I am alone.
I speak to them when I walk beneath stars,
when I walk in the woods, when I walk in the rain.
It is possible to be with someone who is gone.
It is possible to feel what cannot be seen,
to sense what cannot be heard,
to be held by what cannot be touched.
It is possible for love to grow after death.
If there is a secret language, it is, perhaps, openness.
The way air lets light move through.
The way a window invites in the scent of grass.
The way sand receives the ocean,
then, rearranged, lets it pass.

*

Mycelial

Now I understand how grief
is like a mushroom—
how it thrives in dark conditions.
How it springs directly
from what is dead.
Such a curious blossoming thing,
how it rises and unfurls
in spontaneous bourgeoning,
a kingdom all its own.

Like a mushroom,
most of grief is never seen.
It grows and expands beneath everything.
Sometimes it stays dormant for years.

Grief, like a mushroom,
can be almost unbearably beautiful,
even exotic, delicate, veiled,
can arrive in any shape and hue.
It pulls me closer in.

Like a mushroom, grief
asks me to travel to regions
of shadow and dim.
I’m astonished by what I find—
mystery, abundance, insight.
Like a mushroom, grief
can be wildly generative.
Not all growth takes place
in the light.

*

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer co-hosts Emerging Form podcast on creative process, Secret Agents of Change (a surreptitious kindness cabal) and Soul Writers Circle. Her poetry has appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, Rattle, American Life in Poetry and her daily poetry blog, A Hundred Falling Veils. Her most recent collection, Hush, won the Halcyon Prize. Naked for Tea was a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award. One-word mantra: Adjust.

Anniversary, Again by Laurie Kuntz

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Anniversary, Again

I don’t know a love that does not chip away
at the day to day of what couples us.
Every act of creation, also an act of destruction,
and memory is history’s great reviser.

The years pass, the regrets mount,
but so does the shared light
we both enjoy at sunset.
And, there’s the song of the brown thrasher
hidden in our magnolia tree.

We strain to catch a glimpse before it flies–
this memory implanted on its wingspread
soaring away with a piece of what’s been shared.

Things we mark as love
belong in no engraved setting,
but seen in the dusting of grey hairs off the vanity,
the sweeping of the dead
palmetto bug from under the porch light,
ripe pears in a bowl placed on the table,
all marking the tart juice of our shared years.

The days pass as starlings ignore
the boundaries of the skyway.
We remain together under the weight
of every season, standing some days
on a stark precipice weaving stories
into our own private landscape,
all we let in under the presence
of every necessary ripening thing
like these collected years.

*

Laurie Kuntz is a widely published and award-winning poet. She has been nominated for a Pushcart and Best of the Net prize. She has published two poetry collections (The Moon Over My Mother’s House, Finishing Line Press, Somewhere in the Telling, Mellen Press), two chapbooks (Simple Gestures, Texas Review, Women at the Onsen, Blue Light Press). Her 5th poetry collection, Talking Me off the Roof, is forthcoming from Kelsay Press in late 2022. Recently retired, she lives in an endless summer state of mind. Visit her at: https://lauriekuntz.myportfolio.com/

One Poem by Andrea Potos

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ANOTHER ANNIVERSARY OF MY MOTHER’S PASSING

Her joy becomes my joy. —
         Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

This June morning, flickering light and shadow
on the spread pages of my book
while somewhere above me in the arching
and waving branches of the beeches, one cardinal
keeps throbbing an unceasing song.
And the sky–did I mention the cloudless sky?
The softest blue, as if created
with the pastels of a master, then brushed across
with the gentlest sweep of her arm.

*

Andrea Potos is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Marrow of Summer and Mothershell, both from Kelsay Books; and A Stone to Carry Home from Salmon Poetry. You can find her poems many places online and in print, most recently in Spirituality & Health Magazine, Braided Way, Buddhist Poetry Review, and Poetry East. She is actively working on a new collection of poems, generated from the epigraph on this poem, called “Her Joy Becomes.”