January 2022
We who live in cold climates know well the fearsome wonder of a winter storm. The world simultaneously stops and swirls, narrows and expands. We are at once vulnerable and alone and yet part of a profound, communal experience. Whether we shovel, plow, or wait and watch, we are infused with awe for a force greater than our own.
Winter Psalm
by Richard Hoffman
Boston snowbound, Logan closed, snowplows
and salt-trucks flashing yellow, drifts
tall as a man some places, visibility poor,
I sit by the window and watch the snow
blow sideways north-northeast, hot cup
in hand, robe over pajamas.
You have made me to seek refuge
and charged me to care for my brothers.
How cruel. That could only be You out there
howling, cracking the trees, burying everything.
~~ from Emblem
Richard Hoffman has published four volumes of poetry, Without Paradise; Gold Star Road; Emblem; and Noon until Night. His other books include the memoirs Half the House and Love & Fury, and the story collection Interference and Other Stories.
December 2021
As we move towards the longest night of the year, the growing darkness of the approaching solstice tinges our memories of spring’s promise, of summer’s warmth, of autumn’s color with a singular sadness. Eventually, of course, winter’s delights will charm us as they always do; but for now, let us simply face this natural sense of loss, with the wise master, Gerard Manley Hopkins, as our companion.
Spring and Fall
To a Young Child
By Gerard Manley Hopkins
Margaret, are you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's spríngs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
(Public Domain)
Gerard Manley Hopkins(1844-1889) largely eschewed publication during his lifetime. However, his posthumously-published poetry established the Jesuit priest as one of the most important and influential poets of the Victorian era. W.H. Auden and Dylan Thomas each counted Hopkins as an influence.
November 2021
By November, autumn’s giddy, gaudy glory has been spent. The remnants of October spill about us, damp and faded, like discarded streamers after the last party guest has left. November is the month of drudgery, of dimming light, of grim acceptance; and - perhaps, because of this - it is the month of remembrance, of reflection, of gratitude.
Bittersweet
for Barbara Trainer
by Anastasia Vassos
As if the matriarch who died last year
could hear her, Barbara says sorry, Andree
as we hack away at the Oriental Bittersweet.
It’s clung to the porch’s iron railing
for fifty years. Its little orange capsules hold
red seeds that will never take hold
because of our necessary task.
We make our saddest effort cleaning up
the garden for winter. Yesterday, we pitch-forked
the pile of wood chips at the top of the hilll,
moved them down the path to the hollow
barrow by barrow, almost as far as the bridge.
Behind our backs, the red maple in the center
of the yard had dropped her yellow skirt.
The bittersweet won’t grow back -
we’ve made sure of that - it’s invasive,
non-native, and we’ve hacked it down
to its stubby root. But the iris that we split,
rhizomes bleached in a ten
percent solution, will take hold
once spring comes, and push their spathes
toward the sun, standards blazing, beards
almost psychedelic in their insistence.
Such is the stubbornness of nature.
She plays dead, then comes back to life
like Lazarus, who could not stay
underground for more than four days
before he was revived.
The poems of Anastasia Vassos appear in RHINO, SWWIM, Rust+Moth, Thrush Poetry Journal, Comstock Review and elsewhere. She is the author of “Nike Adjusting Her Sandal” (Nixes Mate, 2021). Her chapbook “The Lesser-Known Riddle of the Sphinx” was named a finalist in Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize. She is a Best of the Net finalist, and reads for ,Lily Poetry Review, speaks three languages, and is a long-distance cyclist. She lives in Boston.
More information about Nike Adjusting Her Sandal, in which “Bittersweet” is included, is available at the following links:
https://nixesmate.pub/product/nike-adjusting-her-sandal-%c2%b7-anastasia-vassos/
October 2021
October is magic in New England. It is the month when spring’s fragile blossoms and wee, sown seeds ripen into voluptuous apples and prize-winning pumpkins. It is a mystical month burning with the incandescence of flaming foliage, harvest moon, and candle-lit jack-o-lantern grins. It is a month when - in a certain light - it seems almost anything is possible.
Voyager
By Linda Fialkoff
If you mount the iron horse
And its wings spread out to fly
Feel the knocking in your heart
As you lift up to the sky.
When art’s passion fuels your breath
Clouds of wonder draw you nigh
Pull back the reins of life and death
Tell the horseman pass you by.
Give up struggle and surrender
All the weapons of your flight
And the violin moon will render
Lovers rushing into light.
Here the stars remain unbroken
And the brain cannot know why
Let the words be left unspoken
Let the lips speak no reply.
Rain and thunder saints a throwing
Angels falling with the hail
Keeping watch on all that’s growing
in the dream beyond the veil.
You are shaken you are carried
Down the mountain through the storm
And the evening wind will marry
Rainbow colors of the morn.
Floating freely down the river
Laughing, drinking in the sun
Come the farmers with their darlings
Come the apple fruit and drum.
Linda Fialkoff is a holistic psychotherapist in practice in eastern Massachusetts. She is a self-described occasional poet and a grateful lover of the Earth and all its beings.
September 2021
It’s true; we are no strangers to the damp. According to local meteorologists, this waning season ranks as the fourth wettest summer since records for such details have been kept - generally, not the sort of record we value in our summers.
Yet, as we are reminded by this month’s poem (featured in Old Frog Pond Farm & Studio’s 2021 Plein Air chapbook), sometimes disappointment, loss, “sorrow” can transform, revealing a certain beauty - or silver lining - if we but look.
Ghost Pipe
by Lucinda Bowen
After another skyswell of rain, this morning the Medicine Wheel
is hosting a convocation of waters: Deep Earth Water seeps
through mud to greet her Air Water sisters Humidity and Rain, while cousin Mist
leans down from the treetops, breathless and thin.
In the sapling a song sparrow bathes in a sink of leaves,
and Dew Water tenders her fingers across his feathered young face.
In this flush season, a rush of mushrooms has
ushered to the surface, and in the copse of trees behind the wheel
the floor blooms with fungus. Like a desert after a summer storm, the mushrooms
have emerged abundant, pink-eared and glistening, to soak the sky:
thirsty constellations of spiky puffball, saprophytes, and slippery jack.
In the deepest treedark, a clutch of little wraith flowers
haunts the footprint of a stump. Translucent white, they look like breath condensed,
like cartilage or sorrow, something not meant to be seen on the outside of things.
Ghost pipe is a parasite that begs its sips of sun. It reminds us
that Water, when it washes over, does not always quench the sorrow.
Sometimes it blooms it.
Lucinda Bowen is a poet, writing group facilitator, chicken enthusiast, and in her spare time, a senior HR manager at a Boston-based e-commerce startup. This is her fifth year contributing to the Old Frog Pond plein air poetry chapbook.
August 2021
No single season ever could fulfill all the hopes and dreams which we New Englanders impose upon our summers. With time of the essence, nothing short of perfect weather will do. Yet, as the wet, drab days of July have morphed into ones of heat and wildfire haze, we must embrace the imperfect. After all, isn’t that what we do all the rest of the year? Indeed, as Old Frog Pond Farm beekeeper, Don Rota, reminds us in this month’s featured poem, great beauty can come of a summer storm.
After the Summer Storm
by Don Rota
the sunset murmurs
peepers peep
fireflies mesmerize
bullfrogs deep
the crickets synchronize
bats banter about
the playful orchestra
of light and darkness
of silence and sound
dense pollen scent
wisps of fog all around
senses saturate
nature’s chorus
in droplets of time
the sultry breath
as summer exhales
Don Rota has been a beekeeper for over six years. He manages a dozen hives in Harvard, including those here at Old Frog Pond Farm, and helps mentor new beekeepers.. He advises everyone to “Find a place in nature to inhale the moment and embrace your senses.”
July 2021
Happy July! The first full month of summer is here, and we are more than ready to celebrate this year. Bring on the heat, bring on the humidity, bring on the hamburger-and-tofudog feasts. Bring out the SPF 50, and bring down the ancient box fans. What’s a little sweat when something like normality is returning in the familiar, quotidian details of the barefoot (and bare-face), sizzling season, back again for many of us, at long, long last…
Summer Haiku
~~ by Lynn Horsky
five lines
seventeen
syllables
In a heat wave
night and day sizzle
Too hot and humid
to sleep
hot midnight
presses wrinkled
twisted sheets
Black embraces
pigments of green
stars interstice
coordinates
with leaves
Moon rings
clouds amidst
branches
cast shadows
enclose sensitive leaves
Side-view mirror scene
my sunburnt
elbow and one
sun-glassed eye
reflects
Thick green grassy
traffic islands
asphalt to fry
an egg
sunny-side up
Hydrangea clumps
clipped lawns
concrete sidewalk squares
ants and grubs
dig under
Sun blind
we retreat
air conditioned
in modular
similitudes
Lynn Horsky works at Process, a graphics and fine art studio in Boxborough, MA.
She writes poetry on the side, and participates in Plein Air poetry events.
June 2021
June is back, and - thanks to the wonders of science - it once again is the month of celebrations large and small: A month of weddings, graduations, backyard Father’s Day barbecues; a month of empty places at otherwise celebratory tables.
The loss of those we hold dear is, of course, a part of life impossible to avoid no matter how fervently we wish it were not so. And, equally true, is the fact that each year - even those mercifully free of pandemics - carries with it this cruel potential. Indeed, it is precisely because of this truth that the necessary deprivation of grandparents from their grandchildren and adult children from their aging parents has been one of the most fraught aspects of this COVID year. One less year when there are too few remaining has been a costly price.
And so, in honor of the long-awaited, fully-vaccinated return of smiles and hugs and reunions with elder loved ones, a poignant poem by our founding Poem of the Month editor, Susan Edwards Richmond:
How to Know the Terns
By Susan Edwards Richmond
Fat, fearless on retirement beach,
terns congregate in the pink light,
thirty, forty, in a spot,
posing for Sibley’s brush
We walk right up to them and kneel,
splay pages of the field guide
across our laps, check
marks without binoculars.
My father points to a Royal’s
orange bill, a Caspian’s blood red,
both crest feathers sticking up
in the breeze, Groucho’s wild hair.
My mother says, occasionally
they see a Sandwich, white-tipped bill
foraging the sea, and, rarely,
a Least, exactly that.
The Common, they tell me, is not
so much here, the Forster’s,
rarer still, both tails deeply
forked, bills dipped in black.
Having finally joined the migration,
six weeks over wintering each year
while the upstate New York blizzards
blow hardest, my parents gather
birds for the list, children,
grandchildren. As we watch,
a young boy runs at the flock,
scattering lengthening shadows.
Susan Edwards Richmond is the author of five books of poetry for adults and the Parent’s Choice Silver Award-winning picture book, Bird Count (Peachtree). A passionate birder and naturalist, Susan teaches preschool on a farm and wildlife sanctuary in eastern Massachusetts. She earned her B.A. from Williams College and her M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of California, Davis. She is happiest exploring natural habitats with her husband and two daughters and learns the native birds wherever she travels. Her upcoming picture books include Bioblitz (Peachtree), to be published in Summer 2022, and Night Owl Night (Charlesbridge), scheduled for Spring 2023. “How to Know the Terns” was originally published in her 2006 chapbook, Birding in Winter (Finishing Line Press).
May 2021
Living next to wetlands as I do, I have become one acquainted with (to pinch a phrase from Frost) the turtle. These lengthening days when the sun’s vernal brightness invites both the warm- and the cold-blooded among us to venture out and dally in its dazzle, my hard-shelled neighbors - normally so solitary and self-contained - throng to our local fallen logs and flat-topped boulders like college kids to Miami Beach. Is it just the sun which draws them? Female turtles begin laying their eggs in late May here, Might it be something else?
TURTLE LOVE
by Catherine McCraw
“Turtles cannot sing
and yet they love,”
wrote the poet, Sir Edward Dyer,
deep in the sixteenth century.
Was he right?
What about turtle-like people
who live in thick shells
and tuck their heads
when threatened?
What can a turtle love…
perhaps the night wind
rippling across
an exposed face,
the warm earth
under turtle feet,
or the cool sea waters
turtles submerge beneath
until they must
resurface to breathe?
Can a turtle
love another turtle…
perhaps with circumspection
gleaned from the insight
of why the other turtle
is tremulous,
and wary of venturing
very fast or very far?
Turtles tend to mumble,
while birds chirp and coo and trill,
thus gaining the acclaim
of thousands
of prolific poets who praise
their soaring and their songs.
Turtles also cannot fly.
They only swim or trudge.
But, maybe turtles love
in a cloistered kind of way
not apparent to
the swifter flowing world.
Catherine McCraw is a Pushcart Prize nominated poet and semi-retired speech pathologist. Along with her fellow Custer County Truck Stop Poets, she is the recipient of the 2014 Oklahoma Book Award for the poetry collection Red Dirt Roads: Sketches of Western Oklahoma. She lives in Weatherford, Oklahoma.
April 2021
Happy National Poetry Month, friends. Together we’ve made another trip around the sun - in moods of joy and moods of sadness - with the goodfellowship of poetry as our comfort and our guide.
This April, following as is does a particularly hate-filled March, let us celebrate poetry’s singular, transcendent power to illuminate - across time and borders - the human heart which beats in us all.
GOODFELLOWSHIP
A Fragment by Li Po (李白)
Hast thou not beheld the Yellow River
Which flows from Heaven?
It runs rapidly down and empties into the sea,
Nevermore to return.
Hast thou beheld the mirror in the hall
That reflects the grief of white hair?
In the morning it is like black silk,
In the evening it will be covered with snow.
While we are in the mood of joy,
Let us drink!
Let not the golden bottle be lonely,
Let us waste not the moon!
translated from the Chinese by Moon Kwan; Poetry Magazine, June 1921
Li Po (李白), also stylized in English as Li Bai, Li Bo, and Li Pai, was a Chinese poet who lived during the 8th century CE. Revered as one of the most important poets of the T’ang Dynasty, considered the golden age of Chinese poetry, his work influenced such modern American poets as Ezra Pound, James Wright, and Gary Snyder.
March 2021
Here in New England, the month of watchful waiting has arrived. As the lengthening days lean toward the equinox, our eyes scan the ground for shoots of green and sweep the sky for the flash and swell of bird and bud. Yet, this March also marks for most of us one year since the COVID-19 pandemic first upended our lives.
And, so, as we watch and wait for spring, we, also, hold our breath - awaiting a thaw that is at once literal and metaphorical.
Forecast: Thaw
By Jeanne LeBaron Sawyer
Dark yields to dawn,
and the poplar, each bud tipped
with last night’s frozen rain,
stands gaunt and still.
No branch is stirring as light grows
and birds come, leading gray morning
on to blue day. Mist hovers between cold snow
and faster-warming air. Even the birds
are silent, listening, waiting.
I know the silence, too,
waiting for warming sunshine
and for you.
Jeanne LeBaron Sawyer, 1927-2018, was a librarian, poet, and amateur naturalist. She began writing poetry in high school in Brockton, Massachusetts, and wrote her way through New York, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Maine. Even in the last years of her life she continued revising poems for her first book, Evolution: Poems across Seven Decades, which was published in 2017 by Heron Pond Press, and is available through heronpondpress@gmail.com.
February 2021
Happy February! The month which brings us Leslie Knope's “best day of the year” (Galentine's Day) is here.
During this pandemic year, many of the partner-less among us (and even some of the partnered) have found the loving companionship (virtual, perhaps, or masked and socially-distanced) of our friends continues to be what best sustains us. This month’s featured poem speaks eloquently to that point - and most specifically to the unique gift of female friendship.
For Cheryl
by bg Thurston
We are Poetry Sisters,
who walk year upon year
past the young apple trees.
This farm keeps to its own
company, far from the world
with its industry of war.
Hot sun, not a ripple reflects
upon the pond’s silence.
Our pens scratch on paper
while a heron preens feathers
in the tallest dead tree.
The pine-needled path ends
at a wooden hut, sitting silent,
empty of intent. Hidden
amid hostas, small statues
reveal themselves, still
mindful on their stones.
We search for Buddha.
Alone on a rock, we find
a hunched green figure
shaded by two trilliums
with their trinity of leaves.
Passing a pile of bleached stones,
I hold one to my chest and feel
its heat against my heart.
As we leave, the heron takes flight,
flapping and fluttering above
peace flags, frayed and torn.
After a career in computers and finance, bg Thurston now lives on a sheep farm in Warwick, Massachusetts. In 2002, she received an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College. She has taught poetry courses at Lasalle College, online at Vermont College, and conducted many poetry workshops.
Her first book, Saving the Lamb, by Finishing Line Press was a Massachusetts Book Awards highly recommended reading choice. Her second book, Nightwalking, was released in 2011 by Haleys. Her third book about the history of her 1770’s farmhouse titled Cathouse Farm will hopefully be published this year. She hopes to return to teaching and editing poetry as soon as the pandemic recedes.