Contributors to the Summer Issue 2011

Mark Amorose
C. B. Anderson           
Stephanie J. Angelini    
Arlette Lees Baker      
Franchot Ballinger        
Charles Baquet
William Beyer  
John Byrne      
Selma Calnan  
Catherine Carter          
John Dawkins  
E. P. Fisher                 
Will Grice        
Harriet Guthrie 
Carol Hamilton
Steven Harvey 
Martin Hicks   
Margo Irwin    
William Kerin  
Charles S. Kraszewski 
Jean L. Kreiling           
David Lieberman         
John MacLean 
Clif Mason      
Constance Rowell Mastores    
Steve McAllister          
William McKewin        
Larry Michaels
John Milbury-Steen     
Bruce w. Niedt
Bo Niles          
Richard K. Olson        
Beth Paulson   
Perry L. Powell           
Tom Riley
Leonard H. Roller        
Mary J. Rowe 
Ann Sheldon    
Lee Slonimsky
Larry Turner    
Barabara Wall 
Judith Werner
Gail White       
Virginia Wyler 
Alessio Zanell

Selections from the Summer Issue 2011

DESTINY

The core of the infernal sun,
unclenching jaws of gravity,
disgorged the photons one by one
into a vice, yet some wrenched free

and hurtled in a feral pack,
ten thousand centuries in flight,
careening outward, crashing back,
transmorphed to an inchoate light

in the convection zone the year
that Christ Our Saviour walked the sea
then shot out of the photosphere
this afternoon just after tea,

a burst of sunbeams, surging past
the lure of interstellar space
toward meadows green, and struck at last
precisely as her upturned face

consumed them in the crimson blaze
cast on the lining of her eyes
behind a winsome, azure gaze
and whispered, “Look, Dad, butterflies.”

William Kerin

TO AESCHYLUS

Defenseless, we evolved quite well
equipped with only larger brains
unarmed with fang or hoof or shell.
Diverging from four-footed folk
we would emerge a chosen kind
as Greeks turned actions into art
and Aeschylus, world wise, refined,
put all the bloody scenes off stage
with masks to mark the players part,
and raised man’s suffering for action.

Regression seems complete today
where images and life are blurred
as Wilde revealed in Dorian Gray
a secret taste for blood preferred.
This Aeschylus at last had learned.
With age he found less joy in words
than memories of comrades gone
but for the few upon his tomb
“Here’s one who fought at Marathon.”

Selma Calnan

VIRTUE

I do regret my sanity,
Chafe at my self control,
And hoard the small disparity
Of passion in my soul.

Yet apples of choice within my reach
These well-schooled hands ignore.
Prim habit sets my mouth for speech
When hunger would explore.

Harriet Guthrie

POLAR BEAR

White fur glares on white,
sends all the light back to us
as he flops heavy feet
over ice in endless adaptation
to what serves as surface
in unending cycles
of aquatic evolution.
When I was a child,
the stained yellow one
at the zoo worried me.
He paced and paced,
his pattern obsessive,
his perfect fur, his slashing
paws, his vast strength . . .
as worthless here
as jewels to Pilgrims.
In sleep, did he run
through earth’s cold breath,
hear seal’s slip through the dark
waters just beneath the surface
of all we must awaken to,
awaken to . . .again . . .again . . .

Carol Hamilton

A TRUTHFUL PLACE

You tell the truth we told you not to tell.
You shout the words that no one ought to hear.
For you there is a truthful place in Hell.

In you self-righteousness appears to swell
Because your voice is faultlessly sincere:
You tell the truth we told you not to tell.

You have evaded our irenic spell.
You have ignored our whimper and our tear.
For you there is a truthful place in Hell.

You ring an iron and obnoxious bell.
Your note is too persistent and too clear.
You tell the truth we told you not to tell.

We have declared that everything is well.
Why won’t your observations disappear?
For you there is a truthful place in Hell!

We cannot stand your pure and piercing smell.
We cannot bear this ozone atmosphere.
You tell the truth we told you not to tell:
For you there is a truthful place in Hell.

Tom Riley

LIMITS OF MY KNOWLEDGE

Along the beach the footprints wend.
I do not know where things will end.

You found yourself another friend.
I do not know why things must end.

Researchers tell us time can bend.
I do not know when things will end.

The plots of all the movies blend.
I do not know how things will end.

I’ve seen the way my white cells trend.
I only know that things must end.

Gail White

LAST SEPTEMBER

The laurel mountainside is dark and bright
in distant woods I will not see this year,
where time was just the pace of day and night.

I reeled the water up in morning light
and called the cardinal flower by its name.
The laurel leaves were polished jewel-bright

along a steep incline, where one could sight
a path unwinding to the sleeping deer,
who keep a different count of day and night.

I wrote my postcards home by lantern light
and greeted darkness by its given name.
There, trees are sharp, the moon, pure white,

and owls arise to greet their working light
as summer constellations reappear
to celebrate the solitude of night,

the cardinal flower and the lantern flame,
the banks of rustling jade.  But I am here.
Only in my mind, the laurel’s bright
and time is just the sun and stars and night.

Anne Sheldon

The judge for the quarterly prize  for the Spring issue was poet Diana Der Hovanessian.  Her work has appeared widely, in Agni, American Scholar, Nation, and others.  She is author of 25 books of poetry and translations, including Dancing at the Monastery, her latest.  It was through “dance” she first met the current editors of The Lyric (when their father was editor).  Nancy Mellichamp was living in Cambridge assisting flamenco dancer Victorio with his classes in Harvard Square.  One warm summer day, Diana was walking in back of the post office and the Spanish music from the open class room door led her to join in, thinking flamenco would be good assertiveness training.  Nancy gave her private “catch-up” lessons and soon they were friends and the class was rehearsing and having tea with Diana.   Her choice and comments are below.

It was truly difficult to choose just one poem for this issue’s Quarterly prize because there were so many to admire, including several written by friends and writers I have known for years through new England Poetry Club!  And those, of course, I could not pick.

My final choice, “An Argument,” grabbed my attention with its first line calling a moth ‘a monstrous thing” ( I too had always found moths repulsive  ‘with their hideous bodies.’  But the poet goes on, not repelling, but amusing with his comparisons and his conclusion:  that beauty becomes admired not only because of its intrinsic lovely self but also because of contrast with the beastly. And the poet, David Nolta, does it, writes it, in witty, elegant couplets.   

AN ARGUMENT

Up close, and still, a moth’s a monstrous thing,
But in the air a gorgeous fluttering.
Likewise am I (no! please don’t turn around!)
Best glimpsed in motion, in the middle ground,
Or, like an octopus or elephant,
In a more natural environment
Than this poor cage of lines, cramped and ill-read,
No more at home than they’d be in a bed.
And so, before you brush me off your sleeve,
Order me out, or bring me down, and leave,
Consider (from as many points of view
As I’ve considered with regard to you)
Where best I might be kept in your relation
In order to enhance your estimation.
Please choose this use for me, whom you despise
For all my looks---tusks, tentacles, and eyes:
You’ll find all find you lovelier looking at
(With pity false or true) the beast.  And that
Is how the monster knows himself to be,
And what he knows: no beauty without me.

David Nolta