James Deahl

The Sorrow of God

A Morning Poem
for Robert Bly

I awake at dawn to a day of frozen sleet,
A cold day at the end of February
With the mountain’s face buried in cloud.

It’s so early no one else seems to be up;
Then I hear a car start, its engine warming
By the house next door. Silently the mists lift.

I read last night that a moment of sorrow
Preceded creation, that act that summoned
The Earth into being, and us with it.

The house finches have already returned;
I see them waiting on the telephone wire.
My neighbour enters his car and drives off.

My mountain ash stands locked in a ring of ice,
But the night’s wind has dropped to nothing.
Later, I suspect, this ice will melt.

The day’s still quiet, my children asleep
In their rooms under the eaves. And I cannot
In my moment of time believe in a god of sorrow.

James Deahl

James Deahl was born in Pittsburgh in 1945, and grew up in that city as well as in and around the Laurel Highlands of the Appalachian Mountains. He moved to Canada in 1970 and holds Canadian citizenship. He’s the author (or, in the case of Tu Fu’s poetry, translator) of twenty literary titles.

J.S Watts

Monkey Night at the Circus

Monkey see.
Monkey do.
Monkey gone.
No longer my monkey.
No longer my circus.
Say goodbye to the red haired clowns,
the tension, the drama, the spangled tears.
No more balancing on an impossible wire,
spinning dizzily up high with no way down,
the world running round and round like it will never stop,
everything smooth and shiny bright,
its surface sticky with blurred rainbows.
I sleep better now at night, but the dark sparkles less.

I liked the way the yearning circus lights always
shimmered across the sequins and the glitter,
wishing on a thousand twinkly stars,
pink and gold and bleeding-heart red.
The air stuffed full of the warm sweet banquet-promise
of candyfloss and popcorn.
The crazy, ginger clown made me laugh as well as cry
and the performing monkeys with
their tiny, clever hands and winning grins,
those curling, gripping, funny tails
that wrapped around your fingers
as if they wanted to hold on forever.
I miss the monkeys.

J.S.Watts is a British poet and novelist. Her work appears in publications in Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the States and has been broadcast on BBC and Independent Radio. She has edited various magazines and anthologies. To date, J.S. has published eight books: poetry collections, Cats and Other Myths and Years Ago You Coloured Me, plus multi-award nominated SF poetry pamphlet Songs of Steelyard Sue and her most recent pamphlet, i. Her novels are A Darker Moon – dark fiction, Witchlight, Old Light and Elderlight– paranormal.

 

William Virgil Davis

Journey

I step into my shadow
and the shadow goes away.

How many blackbirds
are sitting in that tree?

If snow fell sideways
would the flakes spin or stop?

Old cats eat slowly.

The colour I most want to inherit
is blue, colour of clouds and water.

When fog obscures the trees beside the lake,
boats disappear, are never seen again.

An evening like this
is one in a million.

Can you see where we are going?

William Virgil Davis’s most recent book of poetry, his sixth, is Dismantlements of
Silence: Poems Selected and New. His first, One Way to Reconstruct the Scene, won the
Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. His poetry has been published widely worldwide.