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.

Alice Harrison

Married by the Book

In my tremulous, yearning girlhood
I worshipped a young Apollo, golden-haired,
and married The collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.

He adored my pale hair and pale hands.
He also adored raven and red heads
and often left me while he swam in the Cam with chaps.

As he matured and gained gravitas
he fired my political passions, taught me mysticism
and became The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats.

He trod softly around my dreams
and loved my fugitive soul.
In middle age he renounced his unrequited loves.

But I grew weary of men and their masculine rhymes,
formal verse, abstract nouns, end-stopped lines: my
husband
blossomed into The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath.

At first we were impulsive and carefree.
I thought I could take on the world and her Daddy
until I was overwhelmed and then came The End.

Now I live alone
with a whole library of Collected Poems.
I can always find a one-night stand.

Alice Harrison is a retired teacher living in Rhyl. She began writing
seriously when she joined the Open University Poets in 1992. Her poems have
appeared in several magazines.

Michael Jennings

Editor at the End of a Long Day

So you like the idea of being called a poet?
Have you got something to say?
I’d be a liar if I said I was all ears.

Perhaps you have some wry observation
to be communicated tongue in cheek,
with a wink in the eye to suggest
there’s a deeper meaning?

Have you stumbled on a striking phrase
which you’ve attempted to dress up
with one or two disguised platitudes
and which you archly call a sonnettina?

Are you proposing a new vision on the world
which you humbly suggest
won’t change the course of history
although you are inwardly confident that it will?

Maybe you just delight in forming words
on the page, carefully shaping each character
with the expensive fountain pen you reserve
for playing the role of a man of letters?

Whatever it is, I’m not interested

Michael Jennings is married with two grown up children who became a Catholic in 1980 after twenty years of dithering. After writing over ten novels, many short stories and plays with minimal success he eventually took to writing poems as a shorter, sharper and more satisfying way on getting things on paper.