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Saturday, 8 February 2025
Five Poems by Wayne F. Burke
Five Poems by Russell Rowland
What’s Going On?
Sparks flew
as the shop clairvoyant sharpened my loppers.
I asked him if the current proliferation of toads
and mushrooms was an omen
he cared to interpret. He replied: “Mushrooms
are just making their case for the rootless life,
toads their case for life on the hop.
But you’re right, there is something going on.
Before I can even begin to envision what it is,
let me ask you this:
have you seen mourners walking the streets?
Are everyone’s blinds closed?
Is water turned off in the fountain downtown?
Are grasshoppers dragging themselves along?”
Catamount
Rumours of mountain lions, catamounts, persist
in our eastern hills,
like apparitions at Lourdes—though zoologists
insist: that species only lives out west.
True believers there are, and will always be—
they would part the protective veil
over that feral scowl, show sceptics the auguries,
parse credible evidence from epiphanies.
Fish and Game humours them:
“It doesn’t matter what you believe—as long
as you’re sincere.”
Yet what you believe determines who you are.
Some of the faithful
have been to the holy mountain, whose height
is whatever their hearts make it.
Not Like the Good Old Days
Those woods beyond the town
used to be as kindly as our favourite uncle—now,
people come out of them
with rashes that won’t go away, no-name diseases.
There are mosquitoes nowadays
that can bite right through two layers of clothing:
vampire mosquitoes.
People are hearing screams,
seeing faces among the trees, and they resolve
never to go out there again.
I asked the shaman at the blade-sharpening shop
about this. Entering a trance,
he said in altered voice:
“If your women are acting strange, having affairs,
is that on them, or you?”
I Wonder What the Crows Are Thinking
A congress of them made the lawn more black
than green just now—
but, once I showed at the window, flew away.
They may have recognized me, standing there
in the accountability of my kind.
Crows are shrewd: they can tell
the west wind from the north, and understand
most of what each wind tells them.
I’m sure all four winds
have had much to say of late—if less about me
in particular, than about culpability in general.
Those must be arduous
winds to ride—for them, and for canny ravens.
They are legion. It may not
work forever, us buying them off with roadkill.
Hearing a Loon in the Distance
During lunch at height-of-land in the Notch,
our attention was caught—
the warble like a grieving widow who has lost
everything, her last two pennies—
yet a loon is no woodland bird.
Then what displacement of habitat or of time
were we overhearing, and why?
Were the phantoms of every creature, extinct
or endangered, now assembling to complain?
Dodos and carrier pigeons
closing in for the kill? Then we remembered:
off beyond the trees there lay a pond.
Russell Rowland writes from New Hampshire’s Lakes Region, where he has judged high-school Poetry Out Loud competitions. His work appears in Except for Love: New England Poets Inspired by Donald Hall (Encircle Publications), and Covid Spring, Vol. 2 (Hobblebush Books). His latest poetry book, Magnificat, is available from Encircle Publications.
Five Poems by Wayne F. Burke
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