[Critique Group 2] Pieces for April 18th

[Abbie Taylor]

I'm pasting and attaching the pieces for this Tuesday's meeting. Hope 
you all are having a great Easter.

***

###1. Poetry from Brad Corallo

Capping off six decades
© By Brad Corallo
Word count 193

It hasn’t been a six story mountain.
Rather an undulating roller coaster track
with easily a thousand tales to tell.
Time like a concertina, expanding and compressing
such a mixed bag of bitter sweet!
Friendships, experiments and epiphanies.
Lovers, marriages and pets.
Great wines, riveting books, successes and failures.
Magic and miracles;
depression, tedium and loss!

Immobilizing fears;
Processed through therapy mills and just doing.
Winter Polar Bear plunges for my own charity.
Poems, prayers and promises
as the lost singer sang.
Crystal clear perceptions and
clouded, confused and absent hours.

Soaring on wings of love.
Sinking under oceans of crushing loneliness.
Beliefs: there is nothing after this,
But there must be.
Spiritual quest; earnest study
and derangement of the senses like Rimbaud.

Ten thousand songs later
loved from seven to almost sixty.
Playing memory tricks;
that is one of their new ones.
Wait a minute
that was thirty years ago!

And what about tomorrow?
Things: wonderful and terrible are all eventual.
And though you can plan for your future,
you can’t plan your future.
In the final analysis, There’s only
Now!

###2. Poetry from Abbie Taylor

PEACE ON CASPER MOUNTAIN
Gravel crunches beneath our feet.
With plenty of grass, bushes,
the forest smells of pine, flowers
under a blue Wyoming sky.
In the distance, a chain saw whines.
Is someone clear-cutting or chopping firewood?
As we walk towards camp, the saw stops.
Moments later, a wood-filled truck passes.
Has enough of the forest been taken for one day?

###3. Poetry from Leonard Tuchyner:

The Onion and the Cabbage

An onion grew near a railroad track.
How it was so, he would never know.
He didn’t care too much about that,
though once in a while he wished he could chat
of certain things which onions hold dear
and other themes about which they care.

One cool late Spring evening,
he spied a tiny black speck
borne on a swift blustery breeze,
in the dimming rosy twilight
which slid and dived out of the sky,
landing close to the onion’s roost.

“It seems like some sort of seed to me,
but from what breed of plant could it be?”

That Spring night came the cool season’s rains.
In the dawning light of morning,
he saw the seed had been swallowed
by a wash of blackish soil.

He wished upon a fading star
that this germ of life would root and grow,
to ease his lonely solitude.
And so his wishes came to be,
though all was not perfection.
This neighbor was not an onion.
He hoped they’d share some interests,
not like the wild weeds and grasses,
who had very different concerns
than did Vidalia onion breeds.

“What are you?”  Onion asked the seedling

“I think that I am a cabbage,
but I could be almost anything.”

“I should expect you’d know what you are!”

“Well, I could be a Brussels sprout,
a broccoli or a cauli. . .
flower, that is.”

“When will you know?”
he said, wiggling his pointed leaves
and exuding onion vapors,
a sure sign of irritation.

“Well, we’ll just have to wait and see.
I am doing the best I can,
you know.
Anyway, do you have a name?”

“No one was here to name me.
I’ve always been on my own.
So you see, I only know me as ‘Me’.”

“Tell you what,
I’ll give you a name, if you’ll do the same,”
She said, flapping her pseudo-leaves coquettishly.

The onion’s leaves turned a darker green.
“Very well, I’ll call you Cauli.”

“Then I’ll call you Oney.”

Cauli grew in the freshness of Spring.
She turned out to be a cabbage,
a beautiful, scarlet red cabbage,
despite her name of Cauli Flower.
The two became the best of friends.
Their love blossomed through Spring and Autumn,
even though they were so variant,
their contrasts required adjustments.
They learned thus from one another.

In deepest despair, Oney learned
that his Cauli would go to seed,
then pass away in Winter’s cruel chill,
While onions rest beneath the earth,
below their brown, withered spiky leaves,
to rise again in next year’s Spring,
bigger and sweeter than ever.

Oney would watch over her brood of seeds,
to greet her seedlings in their season,
tell them of their loving mother,
and how Cauli’s leaving broke his heart.

###4. Poetry from Valerie Moreno

Motherlove
I stepped in to darkness,
a night so thick with sorrow
I could hardly breathe.
My eyes strained for light
from the stars, the horizon,
the hidden chamber of spirit
Listening with every ounce of hope,
a splinter of light appeared--
within me as well as
before my eyes.
In that split moment of knowing
I reached out a hand--
He was before me,
well, alive, smiling triumphant.
"Mother!"
the word shook reality and my soul!
Beautiful, His blue eyes took
away every tear in my heart.
The light between us grew
and the first streak of morning
lit the sky.
All we shared was silent
through heart and spirit as I gazed
at the coming of a new day,
my Son

###5. Poetry from Alice Masa

A Sonneteer's Bucket List
by Alice Jane-Marie Massa


Alas! The day has come for me to ask:
What can you find in my pale Bucket List?
Do I present for you too hard a task?
Of course, my list has a poetic twist!
Turn to Bedloe's Island for your first clue.
A pedestal was placed and did inspire
A "Colossus," once thought of as so "new"--
verses of which immigrants will not tire.
Oh, you know, Ms. Lazarus holds the lead:
her poem is immortalized on a plaque
for generations of tourists to read.
No pages are needed--take this book back!
I want my poem in granite.  Please don't laugh!
My Bucket List comes with my epitaph.

-- 
Abbie Johnson Taylor, Author http://abbiescorner.wordpress.com
http://www.abbiejohnsontaylor.com
abbie at mysero.net
Order my new memoir at http://www.abbiejohnsontaylor.com/memoir.htm
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