Tag: Jo Taylor

The Heart by Jo Taylor

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The Heart

         –After Danusha Laméris and Ted Hughes

The heart is not a gate.
A door that opens and closes
at someone’s will. Not
automated. Not smartphone-
controlled. It is not a soft start
and stop and could even develop
jerks and skips and flutters over
time. It comes with no guarantee,
and the warning is clear–whatever
happens there, happens.

*

Jo Taylor is a retired, 35-year English teacher from Georgia. Her favorite genre to teach high school students was poetry, and today she dedicates more time to writing it, her major themes focused on family, place, and faith. In 2021 she published her first collection of poems, Strange Fire.

Two Poems by Jo Taylor

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Ingenuity

The spider,
Nature’s mystery.
To leave home her first need,
To escape the devouring of family.

Through her jeweled and silkened weave,
She sends warnings and receives messages.
Her gossamer ensnares,
Her venom paralyzes.

Humans, like spiders,
Liquidate their kind —
If there is no communication or
Retreat.

 
The Septad

(With a line from Mary Oliver)

I’m child seven born the seventh month.
I do not have to be good
because I am already perfect, you see.
The prime, boasting about the seven wonders
of the world on everyone’s bucket list,
singing of seven colors of the rainbow
and the seven holes in your head.
(Go ahead, right now, and number them.)
I am Joshua’s horn blown seven times
at Jericho, I’m trumpet seven at the
resurrection of the dead.  I am finished,
complete, whole.  I am luck and mystique,
the winning jackpot at the gambler’s slot.
Popular, powerful, holy, I’m the septad, and
I do not have to be good.

 

Jo Taylor is a retired, 35-year English teacher from Georgia.  Her favorite genre to teach high school students was poetry, and today she dedicates more time to writing it.  She has been published in The Ekphrastic Review, Silver Birch Press, Poets Online, Literary North, Redheaded Stepchild  and Heart of Flesh Literary Journal.