JUDY MONROE, CAROLYN GELLAND FROST & BRUCE SPANG read from their poetry Friday, October 18th 2013, 7pm at the Harlow Gallery, 160 Water Street in Hallowell. Light refreshments served. Suggested contribution: $3.
For further information call Ted Bookey at 685-3636
SUMMER WIND
The summer
wind plays
with yellow
curtain
as if it were
a Chinese dragon
learning
to fly. —Carolyn Frost
STOLEN LEGS
Here they are, i said yesterday, and looking down
stretched out before me on a chaise,
my legs were astonishing, looking fine-skinned
and firm, not a blotch or broken vein,
not a sigh of the crackling of age.
Here they are, I said, an apparition of youth,
appearing like Banquo’s ghost.
Gone my old legs, whose knobby
knees were problematic, one ankle thicker
with liver spots ubiquitous.
Here they are, I exulted, but then, just like that
they vanished as I was reveling in my youth
mystique, and in their place my seventy-plus legs
reappeared, all too familiar, all too antique.
Here they are again, today when I am not
even missing them, those fabulous legs, so independent,
wandering the beach, passing me by, possessed
by a younger woman dressed in shorts, whose lovely
perfect legs (and other body parts as well)
I suddenly realize belong to me. —Judith W. Monroe
HUMANE SOCIETY
The neighbor’s pup,
wanting in,
won’t let up.
Yelp. Yelp. Yelp.
This, the fourth night
of its desperation.
our two cats huddle
at the open window
pretending to be sympathetic.
Downstairs, the cuckoo pleads
its shrill three-stress call.
I can remember,
shivering in my pajamas,
calling out, again and again,
Sandy, Sandy, Sandy,
drifting unto darkness.
Leave it alone, My wife would intone.
Let it learn.
But it was not the dog I was calling,
not then, when my marriage
could be counted in the three-word
sentences we barked between us.
It was my wanting out, there
on the porch in the cold,
waiting to hear how far my voice
could carry across night fields. —Bruce Spang
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