Poetry

The Irish Writer Leaves Home

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by Carmen Mason

How does one explain the perfume steaming
from a timid wrist
the musky scent
the flash of a white instep
Not love    not perfect flesh
but the shame of needing
a giving up    a giving in
a consummation that transfigures
for the moment
that transcends
for the moment

How can I tell my sleeping son
his mother was as brief
and as amazing as a shooting star
on a still    clear    miraculous night
that my leaving like this
without goodbyes
after spitting those acid words
into her questionmark
of a ruined face
is a refusal of everything
that warns me to stay
persist    make do
I am no longer a son of Dublin
There is a world out there
that will now    soon
make me delirious
with its musky
midnight breathing    its
ejaculatory fires
I am in need my son
in demanding need to go

Here is a kiss goodbye

I’ve been writing prose and poetrysince I was six. Won the Ist prize in Seventeen Magazine’s short story contest at 17 and several poetry prizes through the years. I write because I cannot help myself. I write to empty out the thoughts I cannot hold inside a day or hour more.

 

 

 

 

Meditation

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by Stewart Alter 

She had not fed the birds for days
And missed the cardinal in the muddy yard,
The way he dropped down to the earth ablaze,
And slipped back up into the fog unmarred. 

The more drab the day, the more color lent,
For he showed no signs of his search for seeds,
No traces marking a desperate descent
In a life consumed serving basic needs.

Stewart Alter, who joined LP2 in the Fall of 2020, has been writing poetry and painting intermittently before, during and now after a long career in business journalism and corporate communications.

 

 

 

 

Poetry is…

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by Mary Padilla

Physics is what physicists do.
(Richard Feynman said this )
So poetry is…
up for grabs, perhaps, but
it does involve some constraints.
You need to use words.
Well, maybe not –
maybe just syllables
or even sounds.
It uses a verbal medium anyway
not a visual one – except
that there can be an impact
of how it looks on the page
and then there’s word-painting.
Is it like music then –
all about the rhythms
and the emphases
and the inflections?
Yes but
could it be more
about the spaces between the sounds
and the things left unsaid at the end?

Mary set out last semester to investigate poetry by signing up for two study groups on the subject.  When that wasn’t sufficiently clarifying the nature of the medium for her, being at TNS, the home of John Dewey, she tried learning-by-doing and attempted to write some of her own.

On Understanding

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by Mary Padilla

Van Gogh thought that he
“would be understood without words.”
We do think in pictures
when we think of some things.
Some of us do, anyway.
And most of us do think in words sometimes.
But as for being understood…
do we even understand ourselves?

Mary set out last semester to investigate poetry by signing up for two study groups on the subject.  When that wasn’t sufficiently clarifying the nature of the medium for her, being at TNS, the home of John Dewey, she tried learning-by-doing and attempted to write some of her own.

Breakfast

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by Charles Troob 

For Richard Hogan, 1936-2017

He filled the kettle
ground the beans
found a chunk of butter
in a corner of the fridge

selected a scarf
from the stack heaped on a closet hook
swirled it around his neck

chose a jacket to go with the scarf
and the shirt and the boots
and the ratty jeans

checked the mirror
made a few adjustments
added another scarf
said “O-la”
sailed out the door

then crossed the street
to charm the women at La Bergamote—

returning with fresh rolls…

and perhaps a croissant

My dear friend Richard Hogan encouraged everyone to be creative.  He loved my writng, and always asked me to read it aloud to him.

Giving is Getting

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by Howard Seeman

So, here my dear daughter:
I give you this little money now for xmas.
But look what I get?
More Jaimelyn!
I got more Jaimelyn each time I gave you the bottle,
Or a tickle.
Or baby food making believe the spoon was an airplane into your mouth.
Telling you things that felt awesome to you,
or giving you the how to do quadratic equations.

As you grew into no-more-little-Jaimelyn.
Look what I got: big Jaimelyn.

Yup: giving is getting.
Here, with this letter to you: I do it again:
As I send it, I imagine your smile.
Ah, I Get !

Yup, giving is getting.
That is what you do up on stage: performing is giving-is-getting,
or listening to Andrew is
giving-is-getting.

And giving gets more getting than trying to get.

Here, in this little poem, pulling up more of me to do this giving to you,
I get: more me.
Ah, again: giving is getting.

I can feel you get this.
So glad you get it; this gives me a lot of GOT  that you get it.
Now I get, you get, we get: we get GOT together!
A-fast-hugging-each-other-got.
Wow, what a wide got we got from such short little giving.

See? I’m right:
Giving is getting.

Howard Seeman, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, CUNY; Certified Life-Coach. Author of collected poems: “Unlike Almost Everything Else in the Universe” and Memoirs: “You/Me: Getting Under Limbo Bars”. In private practice at: [email protected]

Message

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by Carol Schoen

The girl walked into the overgrown
meadow, wheat-colored grass
concealing secrets.
And then she saw it:

sunshine spewing radiance
from the sign: Cornell Dubilier —
a whiff of college,
of great French artisans.

There is no value in explaining
that it is a company that makes
electronic capacitors —
the child knew she had found
a magical kingdom hidden right there
in the middle of New Jersey.

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

Hare Krishna

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by Carol Schoen

Twice exiled, not yet at home
in the park, the tree
remembers the dappled light
of India

remembers the prayers
the marigolds
orange and red
garlands strewn
among the fallen leaves

home now almost forgotten
in an almost forgotten park
but the faithful found it
prayers send from here
the hare krishna tree
a small sign pasted crooked

for fifty years
the hare kishna tree
they come here to pray

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

Cemetery

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by Carol Schoen

The cemetery cowers
in a corner of the office
park. Bought long ago
by immigrants uncertain
of eternity
it holds many neighbors,
my parents, the family doctor,
my aunt and her demented
husband, a teenage friend
whose presence always shocks me.

I check to see if the lawn
has been mowed, if the dead
juniper bush has been replaced.
A hole in the ground announces
a coming funeral.  I do not
recognize the name.  Finally
I go to my parents and stare
down at their gravestone, blankly.

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

Angel headed hipster

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by Carol Schoen

Calm down, Allen, the angel headed hipsters
are sleeping it off.  The pot’s
all gone. Your momma’s
safe in that big sanitarium
in the sky and the Beat world blew
off in a puff of smoke.  A century
of time disappeared in a cyber minute.
Right now, right here, there’s just you
and me, two Jews trying to figure out
where we fit in a techie’s algorithm.
Here, I offer you, not the clutch
of love but a little of that mother
you hated, loved and wanted.
Come to this clean, middle-class bed
and I will cuddle you and you will remember.

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