February 2014

FEATURED POET: Joannie Stangeland’s new book, In Both Hands, was published by Ravenna Press, which also published Into the Rumored Spring. Joannie’s also the author of two chapbooks: Weathered Steps and A Steady Longing for Flight, which won the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award. Her poems have appeared in Superstition Review,Tulane Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, First Water: Best of Pirene’s Fountain and other journals and anthologies. 

Roost

Words tonight fly out as black as crows,

oily and stubborn, ruffled and sharp.

Feathers may litter the floor.

The air holds a fever, a taut pitch,

a howl we hitch to, each unsure

of our turf. Bristling, a hiss—

and it isn’t the kettle or the cat.

But we swallow the rest, stinging

until the barbs wing into the night.

We settle our worries like eggs.

Tomorrow, we draw the same breath

when we see the mountains rising

into morning, as white as clouds.

A crow’s nest is a sloppy mess,

a loose muddle of twigs in a tree.

Love is like that—on a hard day, held

with spit and bits of string—

on a good day, home.

A Pocket of Time

The sky drops like a crow’s night wing

and clouds build behind the dry hill.

A thimble of weather,

a pocket of time.

You reach in for the moments,

warm your hands. You have stood

on this shore, listened for the gossip

of dried grass, the secrets reeds tell.

At the cusp of another decade,

language is fledging.

Swallow the light on the wind.

Stay for the heron that might alight

before dark. The old words fly south,

leave nests of questions in the shadows—

What is the length of an hour?

What is my deepest fire?

What blessed letting go

will give you back the sunlight

on the thickest cedars,

the clear path through them?

WRITE YOUR POEM:

At times a poem takes on historic proportions when a non-existent prisoner memorizes it.  This poem itself was written by someone in a hospital, struggling against their own existence.  This was the favorite poem of Nelson Mandela.  What is the power of poetry?  It gives the poet life.  It gives the listener life.  Write your poem.  Share it with the wind.  Who knows who will pick it up.

Invictus- William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,

      Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

      For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

      I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

      My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

      Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

      Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

      How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

      I am the captain of my soul.