Tag: Nancy Sobanik

Election Year by Nancy Sobanik

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Election Year

This is a year with no escape
hatch, by July Quackgrass
and Sowthistle hem roadsides,

knee-high weeds root in flinty gravel,
then the flail mower rumbles closer.
Since morning I’ve heard

its approaching drone, ominous
as an enormous hive on high alert,
the sound of swarm fills my ears.

I once thought winter would not pass,
now I wonder if this ludicrous,
over-the-top debacle will ever end?

Summer brings it on, carnival huckster
stoked by a massive infusion of green.
The blizzard comes in autumn this year.

Flail drum blades arrive to shear
thin-skinned saplings into headless pikes,
shave Sweetfern and Yarrow to late-day stubble.

Cut Japanese Knotweed and it returns
with a vengeance, tenacious as black flies
drawn to exhalation for their blood meal.

An ugly business, all this destruction
caused by a flail mower, but without it
roads narrow, and line of sight is gone.

A car needs a shoulder to cry on
when it goes wild, to justify all this ruin,
all this compost spat out and left moldering.

*

Nancy Sobanik is a poet whose work can be found upcoming in Frost Meadow Review, Vol. 12, Triggerfish Critical Review; Sparks of Calliope- Best of The Net Nominee 2023 and Pushcart Nomination 2024; Verse-Virtual; Sheila-Na-Gig; The Ekphrastic Review and ONE ART. She was awarded second place in the Maine Postmark Poetry Festival Contest 2023.

The Unfolding of the Calyx by Nancy Sobanik

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The Unfolding of the Calyx

The buds have come,
first the beech then the aspen,
and catkin litter falls everywhere.
I pull it from the cowl
of the windshield,
wipe pollen off the glass;
the back of my sleeve yellow.

They’ll suddenly be gone in a week
as the crabgrass blades its way
through last year’s leaf mold,
parting like the Red Sea.
My own twisted sepals
are just beginning to unwind.

For four years,
a hurricane of death
flung my severed heart
onto stone strewn ground,
trampled the hollowed chambers
into a juiceless plum.

I contemplate the trees-
do they feel relief
at the end of battering
by unobstructed winter winds?
Do they hum a song
only they can hear
when the sap awakens
to flow like ice out on the river?

Trees will snap their leaves open
into green whispering fans.
I gather pale lemon daffodils
into a blue glass vase.
My fist that holds the flower
will unfold, palm open and up,
offering and receiving.
The blush of blood once more
will petal my cheeks.

*

Nancy Sobanik works as a Registered Nurse, is a poet who lives in Maine, and is active in the Maine Poet’s Society. Her poems have been curated by Triggerfish Critical Review, Sparks of Calliope, and upcoming in Verse-Virtual and the Maine Poet’s Society Stanza.