Tag: meditation

Meditation (Intermission) by Bonnie Naradzay

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Meditation (Intermission)

…what if the master of the show who engaged an actor
were to dismiss him from the stage? “But I have not spoken
my five acts, only three.” “What you say is true, but in life
three acts are the whole play.”

        — Marcus Aurelius

It’s all I think about these days, when intermission is,
will it ever come, has it passed, and how many scenes
are in this act that’s so interminable, if it’s not the last.
Could this be the whole play? Hamlet wanted more time.
The end seems hurried; everyone but Horatio falls dead
at the banquet, then Fortinbras appears. The play’s
the thing! Mother’s things are boxed up in a pre-fab shed
behind my sister’s place. Closets bulge with our belongings,
and what are they for? My father’s French wife got rid
of all he owned as soon as he died although I’d wanted
something to remember him by. She had him cremated;
then the VA sent his ashes east to Arlington Cemetery.
My sister wanted a ceremony right away to lay him
to rest behind a small locked door. I could not face it.

*

Bonnie Naradzay’s manuscript will be published this year by Slant Books. For years, she has led weekly poetry sessions at homeless shelters and a retirement community, all in Washington DC. Poems, three of which have been nominated for Pushcarts, have appeared in AGNI, New Letters, RHINO, Tampa Review, EPOCH, Dappled Things, and many other places. While at Harvard she was in Robert Lowell’s class on “The King James Bible as English Literature.” In 2010 she was awarded the University of New Orleans Poetry Prize – a month’s stay in Northern Italy – in the South Tyrol castle of Ezra Pound’s daughter Mary. There, Bonnie had tea with Mary, hiked the Dolomites, and read drafts of Pound’s translations.
https://www.bonnienaradzay.com

A Mindful Lament by Gloria Heffernan

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A Mindful Lament

They say you can’t get it wrong.
But sometimes meditation
feels like an itchy sweater
on sunburned skin.

I want to peel it off,
free myself from the fibers
that brush and bristle
against the raw places.

Be in the moment, they say.
Feel the discomfort
and let it go.
If this is mindfulness,
let me be mindlessly busy.

Surely there must be a drawer
that needs tidying,
a shelf that needs dusting,
an empty space in my closet
where I can hang this sweater
and just let the sunburn
blister and fade.

You can’t get it wrong, they say.
So I sit. And breathe. I trust.
And I try so hard to empty my mind.
But oh, the burning itch.
Oh the blistering relentlessness
of thought.

*

Gloria Heffernan’s forthcoming book Fused will be published by Shanti Arts Books in Spring, 2025. Her craft book, Exploring Poetry of Presence (Back Porch Productions) won the 2021 CNY Book Award for Nonfiction. Gloria is the author of the collections Peregrinatio: Poems for Antarctica (Kelsay Books), and What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List (New York Quarterly Books). Her work has appeared in over 100 publications including Poetry of Presence (vol. 2). To learn more, visit: www.gloriaheffernan.wordpress.com.

Two Poems by Julia Caroline Knowlton

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Meditation

March colors stain
perfumed air—

pink tulip magnolia,
ivory dogwood, fuchsia azalea.

Abundance blossoming
in a dark arch of rain.

Within this wet darkening
cries an unseen blessing.

In every hidden bird singing
dies my every word.

*

Getting Older

I am becoming a dappled thing.
Silver threads my hair,
dark spots dot my body
like a speckled egg.

Floaters cloud my vision,
meandering opaque grey
in the tiny sky of my eyes.
My ears ring with a song of demise.

A great poet (immortal)
once praised this color palette—
mottled, rose-stippled,
time’s upstream beauty of change.

I can seed a pieced field
with one odd word.
I feed on instinct, on dream.
I am spare and strange.

*

Julia Caroline Knowlton PhD MFA is the author of five books. Recognition for her poetry includes an Academy of American Poets College Prize and a 2018 Georgia Author of the Year award. She is also a nominee for a 2022 Georgia Author of the Year award. KELSAY BOOKS will publish her third chapbook, LIFE OF THE MIND, in 2023. Julia teaches French and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta.

Two Poems by Julia Caroline Knowlton

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November Song

Praise gray skies, wet yellow
leaves fall to red edge. I wonder

why dark winter moves voices
to fear every day, every night

of the dead. How hard we try
to cover fear with wrong things—

hot meat gravy, a fat gold watch,
words of wool, light cheer.

November song, empty me out
to cloth without paint, barest

branches, a cup without wine.
Move me to snow on evergreen pine.

*

Meditation in Winter

I draw an angel halo on paper,
believing only in paper

not the gold shape itself.
I light candles with a red-hot match.

I sing a bitter song or sweet,
peel apples into butter and taste the past.

I write faint words, wash a dish.
Enter crying darkness coming at last.

*

Julia Caroline Knowlton is Professor of French at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta and incoming President of the Georgia Poetry Society. She has an MFA in poetry from Antioch University and a PhD in French Literature from UNC-Chapel Hill. The author of four books and an Academy of American Poets prize winner, she was named a Georgia Author of the Year for her 2018 chapbook, The Café of Unintelligible Desire (Alice Greene & Co.). Her second chapbook, Poem at the Edge of the World, will be published by Alice Greene & Co. in 2022. Julia regularly publishes in journals including One Art, Roanoke Review, and Boston Literary Review.

Three Poems by Le Hinton

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Meditation on Rain on a Blue Porch

This shower speaks of Evans’ piano.
A light touch on the roof —
a remembrance of the bleeding—

a dampened cry and the blunted
hope that “We Will Meet Again,”
knowing we won’t.

*

Meditation on Rain on a Black Porch

The drops echo Trane’s
“Impressions Live at the Village
Vanguard.” My grief keeps pace

with the velocity of the music and my heartbeat.
16th notes flow skyward like Black
bodies in a summer of tempests.

*

Meditation on Rain on a Red Porch

The thunder calls first, then the flash. We comfort ourselves
with lies: We’re safe here. We’re not afraid of ghosts
or what we owe them. It’s the ozone scent

of lightning that reminds me of Cage’s “First Construction
(in Metal),” the iron in a blood-red stream,
the scream when it overflows its banks.

*

Le Hinton is the author of six poetry collections including, most recently, Sing Silence (Iris G. Press, 2018). His work can be found or is forthcoming in The Best American Poetry 2014, The Progressive Magazine, the Skinny Poetry Journal, The Baltimore Review, The Pittsburgh Review, and outside Clipper Magazine Stadium in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.