Five Poems by Stephen Anderson

 

The Then and Now of It

 

I went to clean my father’s tombstone the other day.

Kneeling there a meadowlark’s sounds came my way

and gave company to a gentle breeze that tousled my hair,

along with a sunlight that enlivened me there.

 

But my eyes teared while transfixed upon the blackened stone,

and with scrub brush and water and soap I washed it so

that its granite face sparkled aglow.

 

Slowly words were uttered there, words like I miss you so,

words lost in the muted silence there on the cemetery hill,

so that a fusion did occur in the air in a slight chill.

I apologized in a prayer-like voice the sadness of my guilt,

and I made a pact, in the silence there, that true

diligence in the future I would prove.

 

 

Betrayal

 

The man accused of a heinous act

stands when the jurors enter,

 

his demeanour causes some in the courtroom

to think he is sociopathic-to-the-bone,

while others wonder about the act

 

that led to him standing, alone, there,

seemingly unrepentant to the degree that

 

it fires up anger in the hearts of some of those

beholders of the man’s fate, and when he sits

 

down in response to his defender’s gesture in

accordance with the proper courtroom decorum,

 

he glares over his shoulder at the jurors seated

off to the side, his eyes an admix of shadow and a fury

 

never before witnessed by many jurors,

his grimace a tokened threat delivered right

 

to the chinks in the hearts of those subpoenaed there,

those now in whose hands the accused life is, those

 

unfamiliar with the man’s existence, his back alley ways

and lead-poisoning, his single mother upbringing and gang

initiation and acceptance to the newfound lifestyle there

 

in the war zones his childhood endured, the what the fuck

 

lack of hope that courses through his veins now, the nightmares

in the blackest of black.

 

Cosmos

 

I admire wildflowers

They bloom bold,

Often with brazen

Displays of colour.

I especially cherish

The fact that they

Burst forth in full bloom,

Unaffected by the war

Pandemics wage on

Humanity as if we,

On the grand scale

Of things, don’t matter

That much anyway. And,

Come to think, the follies

Of humankind have ravaged

Our planet, and the flowers

Have not.

 

Telegram

 

Sometimes the river is calm with a glassy smile,

but when it imbibes too much thunder rain,

it becomes nasty-tongued and curses

its riverbed with sloshy slung mud

and river flood, cracks levees

with the force of its flow and its reckless

mindset, one that some struggle 

to explain away with physics, but I suspect

that somewhere beyond that science-faced

rationale there is still one tough God-of-Havoc

trying again and again to tell us something

supremely vital and raw.

 

Voyages

 

I watch from my hotel balcony

as a sailboat in the distance

 

sails its course under a radiant,

powder-blue sky on the great Tagus River

 

whose shoreline laps the enchanting

city of Lisbon.

 

Its sails are billowed with enough wind

to cut through the sea-like river inlet

 

from which Vasco Da Gama voyaged

in caravels fitted and funded

 

by the Portuguese Crown ages

before this tranquil scene below —

 

the magical seven hills of this city

 

of Calçada portuguesa and coloured

walls now kissed passionately

 

by Fado sounds throughout its narrow,

cobblestoned streets singing its

 

paradoxical blend of despair

and hope.

 

In the distance, the sailboat seems to trace

the sea explorer’s path off into the blazing sun. 

Stephen Anderson is a Milwaukee poet and translator whose work has appeared in Southwest Review, Latin American Literature Today, Verse Wisconsin, Foundling Review, Twist In Time, Tipton Poetry Journal, New Purlieu Review, Free Verse, Poetica Review, Life And Legends, Blue Heron Speaks, Amsterdam Quarterly, as well as in numerous other print and online journals. He was the recipient of the First Place Award in the Wisconsin Fellowship Of Poets 2005 Triad Contest, and he received an Honorable Mention in the WFOP’s 2016 Chapbook Contest. Many of his poems have been featured on the Milwaukee NPR affiliate WUWM Lake Effect Program. Anderson is the author of three chapbooks, as well as three full length collections, In the Garden of Angels and Demons (2017) and The Dream Angel Plays The Cello (2019,) and High Wire (late 2021.} In the summer of 2013, six of his poems formed the text for a chamber music song cycle entitled The Privileged Secrets of the Arch performed by some musicians from the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and an opera singer. Anderson’s work is being archived in the Stephen Anderson Collection in the Special Collections Section of the Raynor Libraries at Marquette University.