AVOCET The Weekly
Issue No. 12 | March 6 - 2013
Weekly Avocet - Issue No. 12
Herons Fishing They move in a small stream at first light through a shimmering of shadows. They are here as fish are flashing, coming from the sea. There is one, of the pair, like a stick that moves and shakes. Her legs driving flashing light, up to her mate. They turn their flair of feathers as if to catch that first light, climbing up, through the trees. Bringing brilliance to the warming land, and they move slowly, as morning takes them up and down this stream of life. The sun is hot. The sun is life. It shines and flashes against the basin of the stream, bringing life, love of life, love of freedom, to the world. They move as centurions of peace and love. They move through the waters, through the soul, that nature brings. Its birth, its loving to the land. dnsimmers@yahoo.ca “Sometimes to see life clearly, you have to open more than your eyes.” – from Director George Gallo’s wonderful, endearing movie Local Color, about the Art of Painting, the Art of Living. If you get the chance treat yourself to this movie. I loved it! -2-
Weekly Avocet - Issue No. 12
The Last Frost of Winter
Step carefully, for we are near.
The early morning sunlight shows
Where frosty designs glisten here,
Enduring in the long shadows.
In starlight of the still May dawn,
Like an afterthought, resignedly,
Weary winter has come and gone,
Adorning fair anemone.
Kenneth Heiar ckheiar@lpctel.net
“After a debauch of thundershower, the weather takes the pledge and signs it with a rainbow.” Thomas Bailey Aldrich
-3-
Weekly Avocet - Issue No. 12
Winter Garden This Winter garden
The banksias undresses.
is still and cold.
Its undersides flash
The rose vine pruned
a silvery white,
back to its stem,
then vibrant green
climbs its post
as they twist and turn
without boast of bloom.
with the wind. Hailstones bounce
Parents have put
from the deck,
the vege garden to sleep.
making me glad of
Pea straw covers its surfaces.
my window seat.
Last year’s crops of potatoes and beans,
This Winter garden
a distant memory now.
sends stillness, peacefulness,
The magnolia
beauty of gaze
blooms white,
in its difficult passage.
wind - swept petals at its base.
Anne Curran acurran@clear.net.nz
Pink camellia blooms send nods of cheerfulness from leafy hedges. The rain oozes deep into the soil, a muddy swamp in front of my deck. Mud squelches up the side of my gumboots. Rainwater spills from the cat bowl,
“There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery.” - Joseph Conrad
fresh and clear Sleek blackbirds strut pecking for food.
-4-
Weekly Avocet - Issue No. 12
cold wind street empty a faceless penny Candi Cooper-Towler dragonfly42@comcast.net “The radiance in some places is so great as to be fairly dazzling . . . every crystal, every flower a window opening into heaven, a mirror reflecting the Creator.” - John Muir
HARBORSIDE CAFE, WINTER VIEW From where I sit, warm and well-fed, a duck’s life doesn’t seem like much of one. Two mergansers bob on the cold waves like flotsam and jetsam, their view only water and more water. Neither turns an eye or the anthropomorphic tables on me, neither wonders or cares how much of a life mine is, closed in, behind glass.
Martha Christina martachris@aol.com “Men argue, nature acts.” - Voltaire
-5-
Weekly Avocet - Issue No. 12 bulging winter sun burns on one horizon-- on the other tree tips rekindle red Mark Kaplon markkaplon@hotmail.com
“When I first open my eyes upon the morning meadows and look out upon the beautiful world, I thank God I am alive.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Mudslide It had slipped my mind, The sound of the river at night. Cold nights with no leaves To muffle the harshness Of high water. I must never forget The wrenching of trees As the bank caves in. The abruptness of mud diluted By currents and swirling Like a maelstrom Toward vague remembrance. Like the stark gasp of lightning On turbulent nights, As trees like executed Prisoners collapse. Steve West swest@martinmethodist.edu
-6-
Weekly Avocet - Issue No. 12
Snow Effect
SUPPORT NATURE’S
A wolf ’s howl echoes solemnly ominous message lost to deep caverns. Snowflakes collapse into valleys,
POETS!
light gently on eyelashes. Each melting flake a teardrop,
VISIT US ONLINE
her oval cheek freezes.
Please visit our website www.avocetreview.com
Winter’s frigidity cannot dominate woman cloaked in fur, a vulnerable tenderness swept by each snowflake›s
STAY INFORMED
sparkle in the twilight. Coldness pains
To know it, that you are a poet, you must write, read other poets, subscribe, buy poetry collections, and bring poetry into the lives of those who don’t know of its beauty.
her supple skin, so elegantly framed in mink. Moon rising, another wolf howls.
SUBSCRIBE
Woman’s pale lips part, her howl
Please think about sending a subscription check for just $24 for four issues, (60 pages of pure poetry) (shipping in the USA) made out to:
pierces the frozen night. Gone! Remnant canine prints short-lived drifts decimate their snow effect.
Avocet, a Journal of Nature Poetry Charles Portolano, Editor P.O. Box 19186 Fountain Hills, AZ 85269
Linda Bratcher Wlodyka ginga@adelphia.net
Sample copy - $6 With your subscription, The Weekly Avocet, every Wednesday, is sent by e-mail to all the friends of the Avocet to read and enjoy nature
“Look deep, deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.” – Albert Einstein
-7-
ONE of our ONE own From
Guidelines for SUBMISSION
The Weekly Avocet every Wednesday, an e-mail of Nature Poetry
of our own
Check it out
• Please send only one poem, per poet, per season. Let’s do winter-themed poetry for now.
Poet Cleone T. Graham has sent us a
• Please no more than 38 lines per poem.
link to the Society for the Protection
• Please use single spaced lines. • Please use the Times New Roman - 12pt. font.
of New Hampshire Forests. They are
• Please send your submission to angeldec24@hotmail.com
a wonderful organization. Forest Society: Welcome
• Please remember, previously published poems are fine to send. • Please always put your name and email address under your work, thank you.
click the pic Things To Do
Our Properties
How You Can Help
Catching up with Jack Read this wonderful interview with the poet Jack Gilbert, who died last
poet’s life!
I love getting poems sent to my computer. What a great News Research Join Room & Mapping Now! way to start any day. A wonderful website is Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, every day one poem and lots of Art history.
Land Conservation
Please check it out: http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/ Click here to Help I start reading it, great fun! Visit everyday our Blog Thank you for reading.
year at the age of 87. He lived a Paris Review - The Art of Poetry No. 91, Jack Gilbert
Issues & Action
more
About Us
(03/13) | Natural Resources Gem Conserved in Newfound Region
Sign up for the Forest Society's FREE monthly eNewsletter!
Charles Portolano Editor of the Avocet
(02/13) | 3 Ways You Can Help Get LCHIP Back on Track in March
Click here!
(02/13) | Wall Street Journal: Tax Laws Give Breaks for Land Conservation (02/13) | Award-winning Artists Exhibit Landscape Paintings at Conservation Center Follow Us (02/13) | Partnership conserves dairy farm in Lee
Blog
Current Issue
Interviews Archive Read our member Subscribe
click the pic
magazine online
Jack Gilbert, The Art of Poetry No. 91 Interviewed by Sarah Fay
unsubscribe PRINT
|
|
|
| View a manuscript page Bookmark & Share MORE
Contact | Events | Newsletter
| Forest Society Closes on Key Parcels to Block Store (02/13) About Northern Pass Route
X
LinkedIn Facebook On the rare occasions when Jack Gilbert gives public readings—whether in New York, Twitter Email Pittsburgh, or San Francisco—it is not unusual for men and women in the audience to tell Print Gmail him how his poems have saved their lives. At these gatherings, one may also hear wild StumbleUpon Favorites stories about Gilbert: he was a junkie, he was homeless, he was married numerous times. In Blogger Tumblr reality, he has never been addicted to drugs, has been impoverished but never homeless, and
(02/13) | AMC, CLF, NH Audubon, TNC and SPNHF Recommend Improving SEC Process (01/13) | Monadnock Ledger-Transcript: Anonymous Donor -One Loud Statement Fall/Winter 2005 (01/13) | Donor Gives Forest Society $500,000 for Land No. 175 Protection, Trails Grants Purchase this issue
(01/13) | The Hippo: Tree Monitoring
If you want off of this list, please send an e-mail to cportolano@hotmail.com and http://www.forestsociety.org/[3/4/2013 9:53:46 PM] write “unsubscribe” in the subject line.
More...is(337) was married only once. The fascination with Gilbert a response, above all, to the power of Settings Privacy his poetry, but it also reflects the mystique ofAddThis a life lived utterly without regard for the conventions of literary fortune and fame.
Gilbert was born in Pittsburgh in 1925. He failed out of high school and worked as an exterminator and door-to-door salesman before being admitted, thanks to a clerical error, to the University of Pittsburgh. There he met the poet Gerald Stern, his exact contemporary. Gilbert started writing poetry, he says, because Stern did. After college he traveled to Paris and worked briefly at the Herald Tribune before spending several years in Italy, where he
Fiction
Ma Jian, The Woman and the Blue Sky Benjamin Percy, Refresh, Refresh Interview Jack Gilbert, The Art of Poetry No. 91 Orhan Pamuk, The Art of Fiction No. 187 Poetry
Mary Jo Bang, Five Poems John Burnside, Six Poems Jack Gilbert, Five Poems
met Gianna Gelmetti, the first great love of his life. But Gelmetti’s family, recognizing that Gilbert would never provide her with much financial or domestic security, persuaded him to
Sketchbook
end the relationship and he returned to America—first to San Francisco and then to New York—where his career as a poet began.
Photographs
In 1962 Gilbert’s first book, Views of Jeopardy, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize and was considered for the Pulitzer Prize alongside collections by Robert Frost and William
Andy Friedman, At the Fish Market
Suyeon Yun, Two Koreas, Ten Portraits Dispatch Karl Taro Greenfeld, Wild Flavor Document
Also visit: