Ghosts

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The Linnet's Wings Ghosts

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Published by The Linnet´s Wings 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

For permission requests, mail the publisher at thelinnetswings@gmail.com Ordering Information: Single Copies available from our website: www.thelinnetswings.org Quantity sales. Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, mail the publisher at the address above.

ISBN­13:978­1523219407 ISBN­10:1523219408 Spring 2016

Frontispiece: Mistress Rembrant reading while sitting on Van Gogh's Chair in Carl Larsen#'s kitchen, PS, MLF, 2016

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Other Publications by The Linnet´s Wings Classic: The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ISBN 13: 978­1480176423 Classic: Randolph Caldecott, The House that Jack Built ISBN­13: 978­1483977669 One Day Tells Its Tale to Another by Nonnie Augustine ISBN­13: 978­1480186354 About the Weather­­ Spring Trending by Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick ISBN­13: 978­0993049330 This Crazy Urge to Live by Bobby Steve Baker ISBN­13: 978­0993049­0­9 "Disabled Monsters" by John C. Mannone ISBN­13:978­1522869504

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Prologue:O Captain! My Captain! by Walt Whitman xii Editor´s Note x Epigraph, Walt Whitman xv SHORT STORIES Imprisoned by Love by Tom Sheehan 16 Archie's Heart-Breaking Discoveries 87 CREATIVE NON FICTION The Ghosts of Lily Pond by Tom Sheehan 4 MICRO FICTION Big by Robert Scotellaro 2 Cut Loose by Digby Beaumont 95 POETRY On “Becoming a Tree” by James Graham an editorial by Oonah V Joslin 43 Continental Drift, Bill West 50 Eve, A story of grit and good cheer, Bill Frank Robinson 52 In which I am An Cailleach Bhéara*, Carla Martin-Wood 54 Feedback, Terry Jude Miller 62 April and my Plastic Sunflowers, Sonnet Mondal 63 Crone’s counsel, or how to see in a spring forest, Carla Martin-Wood 67 Fumus Autumnus, Catherine Power Evans 65 Death, Dolores Duggan 70 Three Tanksa, Sergio Ortiz 64 Fountain, Beate Sigriddaughter 72 On the Seashore, James G. Platt 78 This is Magic, Westering, and more Fianna (Fiona Russell Dodwell) 73 Lazarus Jewel Box, Jane Burn 73 Poe-ish, Jane Burn 66 Hardings Beach, Margot Brown 76 Poem, Robert Grossmith 79 Sandie and Dud, Robert Grossmith 82 The Opal Miner, Clare McCotter 83 In Bellaghy Graveyard, Clare McCotter 85 The Dogged Determination of Cats 58 Tiny Fingers, Irena Pasvinter 60 Crescendo, Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick 48

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SPANISH NEW WORLD POETRY Juana de Ibarbourou, Stephen Zelnick 25 ART Sailing ship by Caspar David Friedrich xi Cover materials of folder of the Congress Committees of Poor Peasants by Kazimir Malevich 1 Skatin', Childe Hassam 3 Harvesting ice by Carl Larsson 11 Destiny, excerpt, John William Waterhouse 15 Combat of Centaurs by Odillion Redon 19 Old Live Oak Tree and Bluebonnets on the West Texas Military Grounds, San Antonio, by Robert Julian Onderdonk 41 Helen Beatrix PotterThe Mice Stitching Button-Holes, Beatrix Potter Lascaux Cave Paintings 13 Peter Pan is the fairies' orchestra, Arthur Rackham 47 Winter in Abramtsevo by Valentin Serov 49 Above us the great grave sky by Arthur Streeton 53 And then, the lover sighing like a furnace, with a woeful ballad made to his mistress's eyebrow- Louis Wain 57 Woman and Child against a Stained Glass Background, Odilon Redon 57 Head of a Woman in Front of Sunflowers by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 59 Stream in Forest,Winter byThomas Hill 69 The Path intersect the Garden by Grant Wood 51 Landscape Study by Theodore Rousseau 61 Cuckoo! He's back, Honore Daumier 74 Among the lillies by Paul Gauguin 69 Four Sketches of a Foot byVincent van Gogh 81 Plate 136 Meadow Lark by John James Audubon 86 Sea Idyll, Joaquín Sorolla 75 Crows Fly by Red Sky at Sunset by Shibata Zeshin 66 Edge of the Forest (Spruce forest), Ivan Shishkin 71 Poet's Dream by Odillion Redon 83 The Circus by Jules Pascin 87 PHOTOSHOP

Marie Fitzpatrick Blackbirds Wearing Britches in Dromod Harbour xi Portrait of a man of noble birth with a book 77 Balloons on Beach at Fecamp 95

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Editor's Note I have been working over in Photoshop, this quarter, in Gimp--the open-source program. Just having a bit of fun with some of the classic art images. Moving characters around timelines, blending Van Gogh with Rembrandt and Larsen, and a few more, too.

For imagination breaks on visuals and it's cemented in words and media, in stories and poems, and art; and in images found in fairy tales and religious stories.

I love the stories--a young woman meets her prince, another young woman conceives of the greatest story ever told, a kiss turns a frog into a prince, a pauper finds his crown; and folk fall in love with an idea and build a social and internal world around it. It's why we like to work with lovely ideas here at LW, to work with others to help create beautiful worlds. To impress them on the air, to let them fly, to break through into a reality.

For what we put out we get back and who we are is governed by what we experience. Isn't it! Give me beauty, honesty and truth any day.

It's a tip of the hat to our writers for allowing beauty and love and honesty to seep through into our environment and for allowing us the opportunity to read, to muse, and speculate on their world view.

On another note I saw a February first sunset here on St. Brigid's Day this year, this is what it was like: St Brigid's Set Sundown presented as a glowing white ball.

It poured a diamond path onto an easy sea.

On the beach a fisherman sat with two rods, And a heron fished in the clear water.

And I thought that someone somewhere had released A photo into the aether, someone somewhere Had cared about light and beauty.

Someone somewhere sometime had impressed A form that was replayed this evening at sundown.

My best, Marie

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Blackbirds Wearing Britches, PS, MLF 2016

Editors for the Issue Managing Editor Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick

Consulting Copy, Digby Beaumont Photography, Maia Cavelli

Senior Editor Bill West

Contributing Editor Martin Heavisides

Fiction Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick Bill West Yvette Managan

Web and Database Peter Gilkes Offices: Mullingar, Co. Westmeath. Ireland and Motril, Granada, Andalusia, Spain Online: Zoetrope Virtual Studio and The Linnet´s Wings

Poetry Oonah Joslin

Design: Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick 2016

Spanish Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick

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Prologue

Sailing ship by Caspar David Friedrich

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O Captain! My Captain!

by Walt Whitman O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done; The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won; The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring: But O heart! heart! heart!

O the bleeding drops of red, Where on the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells; Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills; For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a­crowding; For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning; Here Captain! dear father!

This arm beneath your head; It is some dream that on the deck, You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still; My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will; The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done; From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won; Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!

But I, with mournful tread, Walk the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead.

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Epigraph "May peace dwell within your heart and understanding in your mind.

May courage steel your will and the love of truth forever guide you."

From a book of Thanksgiving Prayers

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Elbrus. Moonlit Night, Arkhip Kuindzhi

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Robert Scotellaro

Big by Robert Scotellaro He drove a monster truck in a big stadium on the weekends. The roar of cylinders and crowds still in his ears days later. So high up. With such power under him, it was almost subterranean to sit in that overstuffed chair his father died in with a mystery book on his lap.

Mickey Spillane, he recalled, with a single match for a bookmark.

Something about a shotgun hole in someone so big, a baby could crawl through without ever getting its shoulders wet. And nothing good on TV, and their old cat just shit in his slipper. And his wife was pecking at him from the kitchen about God-knew-what. And, Christ!—the weekend just couldn't come quickly enough.

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Skatin, Childe Hassam

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Tom Sheehan

The Ghosts of Lily Pond by

Tom Sheehan

Ah,

Saugus, the town I took to Korea many years ago, savored, brought back! Images strike here, deadly accurate in their mark. Metaphors, booted and buckled and loaded for bear, ride horseback through my town, holding forever in place. At times they ride roughshod or, taking a breath, saunter a bit, smelling new­cut hay over hill, or marsh grass caught up in light appreciation of salt about the air, all Atlantic talking. Realization comes too: Times there were when our river was like an old man trying to get into bed, slow climb at banking, belt or pajamas astray, slight failures; some springs, it would be caught up in flume’s rush. Our pond, long­gone Lily Pond, comes up odd mornings of memory like a hobo rising from his varied nights; a serious master of colors, Persian red, coin gold, yellow of a wheat or a blonde, autumn in the traces, ignition’s flare. Or there’ll be April­May at explosion about that wide saucer of water, Turnpike to dam, cliff­face to Prohibition cabins now taller with cellars plunked beneath them, post WWII heaven for returning veterans, with their new brides, foreign brides, casting hundreds of skaters and swimmers and boaters and fishermen on these shores, on that horizon before any of us realized the change.

Diamond­faced Lily Pond, our old Lily Pond, the pond of the '30s and '40s and '50s, had many faces, sleek and choice cuts, facets that still shine a kind of brittle memory, a storehouse of vignettes, tales, small mysteries, undimmed personalities, pieces that continually show us growing up and coming this way.

If you’re careful, alert, patiently waiting, the larder might spill itself, tell its own tales. ** The man was raw­boned, sleek, could skate like the wind that blew out of Canada on winter days around the corner of Appleton and Summer Streets. Hair dark, eyes holding stories, he wore a magnificent pair of hockey gloves. Great, shiny black elegant things, tools of the trade, the kind we’d not ever seen. Hockey gloves!

Like a policeman’s badge, a fireman’s helmet. An image gained and kept forever. Who had money for such things, such extravagance!

And his stick was always new; the blade daily wound with clean tape, and his name, barely legible if you

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wanted to stare closely at its small letters, burned its darkness high on the handle. His neat Chinos, telling you he might be a veteran of the war newly at silence, all Pacific quelled, were neatly bloused about his bulky shin pads with rubber bands cut from inner tubes, the bottoms of the pads visible and deeply red as they hunkered above white skate laces. Only his mean skates were throwbacks into other wars of ice; scarred, ugly things, merely the blades of them shiny with the art of maintenance.

He was not from Saugus, not a Saugonian, and carried a few pucks of his own, never to be without.

But two days during the school week, and every Saturday and Sunday in skating weather, which seemed to be forever, he was on the ice of Lily Pond. Waiting for a game, he'd fly about the pond like something out of Hans Brinker and Hans' miles of canals or a Canadian truant doing the canal at Ottawa. When a game started he was first into it, then, as the games grew in number and spread across the face of the pond, he'd slip off to one with better talent, headier challenge.

For the games did grow, especially on a weekend and the skaters coming out of Melrose and North Revere and Lynn to enjoy the hockey on Lily Pond with us Saugus skaters. There'd be ten or twenty games at one time spread across the pond. There’d be by the boat house where canoes and rowboats were put away, in the cove by Cliff Road where we've skated as late as May of the year in the shadows of the cliff, out beyond Fiske's Icehouse, up near the Turnpike, at the head of the Island, over by Frank Evans' Beach on Lily Pond Road, down by the dam, over by Rippon's Mushroom House that used to be Monteith's Icehouse. Hockey everywhere. Pond hockey. Wide­open hockey. Pucks sliding out of one game and into another. Racing to retrieve our one last puck at times after we'd lost others down in watering holes where all the long day we quenched our thirsts.

That's what brought the dark man with the great gloves. They said he once skated with the Boston Olympics, had been hurt in the Boston Garden, once was a Bruin for a cup of coffee. But he'd shift into gear easily in a game with Lonnie Green, Brother Parker, Jackie and Charlie and Googie Prentice, Neil Howland, Eddie Ayers, Jimmy MacDougall, Mike Harrington, Billy Falasca, Randy Popp, Red Parrott, Dickie Weeks, (oh, many of them gone now) fifty or sixty friends out of East Saugus and Cliftondale and Saugus Center as the games grew, multiplied, spread to all ends of the pond like a precursor to an Olympic Village in Lake Placid or out in Utah, building up in dreams.

If and when it snowed, we'd shovel rinks out of the snow, and Lily Pond, from a distance, from a hill, would look like a battlefield filled with square or rectangular bomb craters. Rocks or logs would be our goal posts, and occasionally, in early spring, the ice still on the pond, you'd have to be alert for old goal posts having sunk part way into the surface. Once an old pair of ankle­high boots lasted until the spring thaw took them down, past the last goal scored. (Were they volunteered for their post, I wondered, or confiscated from a shore­line log? Did someone leave in their stocking feet?)

But when the pond was free and clear and the ice good, there'd be hockey all of daylight. Then at night, under the stars or the moon pressing inevitability down on us, came trysts in the making, life­long friendships being developed or remembered forever. There'd be a whip with fifty or sixty kids holding hands. The one on the end better be a good skater because he or she would be snapped off to the winds, a solid rush of breath into lungs, speed momentarily paralyzing a pair of legs. Later there'd be cocoa and doughnuts at Frank Evans' pond side camp or a game of hide and seek so you and your girl could be hidden for a while, away at the dark edges of the pond, the owls hooting at your daring, your hand slightly cupping one of the new graces.

But younger, when the pond began to be a thing in my life, friends and I would walk to the pond on

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a Saturday morning, skates slung onto the blade end of hockey sticks, shin pads slipped over the other end and paired up with inner tube bands. We'd walk up Appleton Street, the ever­wind against us, anxious to see the ice condition, hurry in our pace, a dryness in our throats as we generated our own excitement. We'd pull on and lace up skates, play hockey until noon when, in my case, my father would come often times with a sandwich and cocoa in the back seat of the car. He’d loosen my skates, rub my feet, turn me loose in half an hour, come back at supper time with the same deal, saying as he left me, “Be home before midnight.”

Trust was in the air, flowed about us as fully as the wind on the pond. Those were the days when a sleep was a sleep.

And the dark skater with the great new gloves, almost as thick as boxing gloves, dreams in themselves, would be there, just as he is in today’s memories, flying across the ice with a puck on the blade of his stick, and never looking down at it. Never once.

I wonder if he knows he is remembered close to 75 years later. Does a thing so small fall away from Time?

Does it count for him?

** The man with the beard, glasses, an old felt hat, would come in an old Chevie with his canoe tied across the top. He'd bring his gear to the edge of the pond near Fiske's Icehouse, put it on the bank or on a rock at water's edge, go back. Like some gymnastic creature, he would slide the canoe off his car and carry it overhead to the water, dropping gradually the prow of it to water's touch as he swung it counterclockwise from its stiff­ arm tier.

When his gear was loaded, he slipped easily into the middle of the craft and slid off from shore. On his knees, a few paddle strokes took him straight as an arrow out toward the deeper water. Before you could time him, as if he did not want to lose a minute of fishing time, or too much unfished water left in his wake, his deft hands would swing and switch a rod’s line out in front of the canoe. You could see where the lure plopped into the water, where pickerel and bass abounded you were sure, as he was, for he never came back empty­handed.

Some mornings the envelope of silence was broken by that single lure hitting water. I can hang my hat on it today.

Other canoes would leave, during all parts of the day, and rowboats too, from the gray rental shack that now would be located down below the Knights of Columbus gate, and behind Eldon Sweezey's place. People would come from East Boston and Revere and Lynn to boat and canoe and fish at Lily Pond. Sweet tooth for those carp roiling on the surface. They'd come by bus on the old Hart Bus Line or the Rapid Transit. I'd envision them getting transfer after transfer to get here, carrying their rods folded or knocked down on the bus and their tackle boxes as noisy as change makers. Or they'd come and park Hudsons and Grahams and Packards and DeSotos and Chevies and Fords where Shadowland Ballroom's cement block pile supports were still exposed after the fire. You never knew their names. You might never see them again, but would remember now and then their faces, their laughter, their gaiety as they came to share Lily Pond with us, the sun new and shiny and warm on the skin, the sky blue all the way past the Turnpike, Saturday or Sunday at hand, Lily Pond swelling its ranks of lovers. **

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I ce

nf nd i

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e w i ll d l r o F he w t y i re e sa i ce . de s fi r e . f So m s a y i n o d r e a s t e f a v ou t So m e ho I 'v ha t ho s e w w t m e, Fr o d w i t h tw i c a te h l s h ri I ho o p e u g h of n i c e t d no io ha i f i t k n ow e e s t r u c t t u B d I f or ink I t h y t ha t a t T o s o g r e a u f f i ce . s ls I s a w ou l d And st F ro t r e Rob nd i re a

Harvesting ice by Carl Larsson

From the sloped rock face on the Island, Southwest side, in the afternoon sun in the middle of Lily Pond, the girl in a blue two­piece bathing suit arced gracefully through the air. She was sylph­like, smooth, curving her body a little bit more as she reached the apex of her dive, and slipped easily into the water of the pond when she straightened out. We'd watch her graces, my friends and I, as we lay back on warm rocks, the sun beating down on us in its July fashion. Her name was Shirley. She was the first graphic torture for many boys, left their mouths dry.

You couldn't beat Lily Pond on a good day! That's for sure.

The canoes would slip past the island the way the girl dove, just as sylph­like, smooth as creation, and silent. Rowboats, though, would clank into sight, the oars banging in the oarlocks like messages of labor. Passing

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our place of swimming, fishing poles would be retrieved from water, lures pulled back. Nobody ever had to say, “Look out there! We're swimming here.”

Of course there'd be more than one girl in a blue two­piece bathing suit, more than just Shirley. That's what swimming was all about. They'd come from Lynn and Revere and Malden and bring lunches with them and colored towels, and their combs. And there'd be our own classy classmates and schoolmates diving off the rocks, Hollywood on our own Island. There were the Stead sisters and Lila off the hill, and another Shirley all the way from Cliftondale, and Gracie, and a girl with the boldest message to her tan, who once swam in the Pit on Main Street after diving from a dead pine tree, sleek, tanned so daring, so daring.

At the other end of the pond, down by the dam and old Catamount Cove, as the historians call it, some sixty yards out in the water, was a rock that you could stand on and rest, and now and then pass the time of day, or evening, with another swimmer, the moon directing conversation, the silent and hidden beat of correspondence. Along the shore on many days small boys would be looking for tadpoles and frogs, among other collectibles, and would see quiet flotillas of pickerel hard against a banking, their tales barely twitching

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as they nosed into the shadows, digging into the work of life.

Every so often the boys would chase a butterfly or stop to listen to a bird singing it was a good day for hunting frogs.

Once in a while Dickie or Edson Evans' long, powerful blue boat with an in­board motor would cover the dam end of the pond with a roar. It was like in mid­winter. Then, Dick Woods might fling his propeller­ driven iceboat over the same route, the gasoline engine howling, a trail of blue smoke following its cutting arc across the ice, the prop snapping at cold air, at a distance a pair of iceboats silently showing off their generous white sails with the elegance of grace. ** Much of its surface reduced now, Lily Pond of our youth has gone into that other world. It was shrunken, fill taken for Logan Airport, the perimeter declining. At times in this short life there seem to be few mysteries.

Other times they overwhelm you. But there was no mystery about Lily Pond. Except how it got away from us in one fell swoop.

Once, in the dead of winter, Saugus frozen tightly, the pond face smooth as baby's skin, we put remnant sheets on wooden crosses, as if Jesus was with us all the way, and sailed on skates the length of Lily Pond. A number of times we'd done it, a number of days that winter, other winters, the cold plunge a solid being in itself; that cold to be borne and survived only in total exuberance, there being no other way “being about on the pond.”

At times that ride bore breakneck speed, wind more the sole ally, as we blew away from Sawyer's Ice House. That’s where innocently now and then, atop old strewn sawdust, orange I swear to this day, in the sweet cream of youth, in semi­darkness, at the epicenter of Saugus according to Doc Sawyer, we'd steal a light kiss or two from a dream girl. Kisses from those unfledged lips to be remembered a lifetime later, or the first touch of a breast given to your hand. Remember that breast, what face it had, if you see her today in an aisle of the mall, looking at you, remembering.

At the old tin shack where boats and canoes were rented out in another time, our sheeted flight would start down along a reedless shore climbing quickly to where gray cement blocks were all that remained of Shadowland Ballroom, long gone in fire. (Less than a decade later we'd pass through the infinite acreage of strung­out, geometric foundations of Hiroshima and recall the positional blocks mere Shadowland left behind.)

Skirt a hockey game or two we could or scream at a snaking whip of hand­holders that we were coming through, the tone of our voice depending on the wind's force. Past the channel by The Island we'd go, being sure to stay clear of sometimes­thinner ice where water pumped below the surface.

Breaking out into the openness at The Point, Arctic bareness the challenge, a white almost never­ending expanse ahead, the wind a howl in our ears and at our backs, knowing the practical certitude that our blades would not find a crack in the ice, we faced the ultimate transition. Now pure speed became the entity, sheer speed, demanding that blades be light and controlled, knees slightly bent, arms the mast and tiller, eyes though air­struck on full alert. In a fraction of a second gauge all the other skaters on the pond. Calculate where paths might cross. Beware of mothers with babies in tow, doting fathers, the elderly, or the ankle­ wearers who could not handle skates yet, who did not know this most savage of joys.

Keep an eye out again for Dick Woods' iceboat, roaring gray monster of the slick deep, with that wooden

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airplane propeller behind it pushing larger than life. Sometimes we surprised him! Swooping in silence out of the all­white shoreline, like a Finnish ski­trooper the Pathe News had shown us at the State Theater or someone from our own 10th Mountain Division on the same theater screen. We had to be sure of residue rock goal posts between which players had the day before slung the black puck with both skill and vengeance, sometimes so hard it could be picked up and carried unsullied and dauntless in another game, or fly clear across the pond.

On special occasions, in that Arctic waste, we had to be aware; truancy, your sheeted cross the only sail on that vast sea of near­black ice and Buck Murray buzzing the pond in his Navy Grumman Hellcat, after he did the Town Hall, after coming out of Quonset Point: the Truant Officer, in his car, intending to meet you at destination, across from the White House Restaurant on the Turnpike, people reporting the capricious pilot.

But past The Point, where the wind tunnel came to full effect, the exhilaration was the game. The free flight, near frictionless. The almost, free­fall sensation. The Turnpike shore riding to meet you, cars and trucks out there on that black patch of road, commerce and usual care passing by in an endless Morse Code, and you here, where speed and freedom counted more than anything.

To stop all you had to do was drop your cross.

Or have someone take down the dam, to grovel at gravel!

Let Lily Pond float down­river! Past Salter's Mill and the old Scott's Mill, past the foot of the Ironworks, past old Indian burial grounds, past the fleet of lobster boats at the end of Ballard Street, past the red brick stacks of the General Electric, going all the way out of town. As if the Atlantic needed another droplet. Loose much of that great ice surface. Let loose all the swimming at The Island or at The Dam. Forget the winter donuts and cocoa or hot cider at Frank Evans' camp on the far side of the pond. Forget the midnight swims from there to the rock on The Island. Turn a goodly part of Saugus onto runways or extensions of Logan Airport, by the thousand truckloads.

All this was a conscious sadness. All this was savaged.

Generations of Saugus youth have missed that godly speed. It sits there now, mindful, trying not to let go forever, the cut of the wind often sharp as honed edges, the spar and sheeted sail pulling at wrists, at shoulders, a cluster of skaters madly dispersing at your approach. It was all of time and memory being pulled along by a hidden wind. ** If you ask a hundred old­time Saugonians about our town, those that have moved about this world of ours, many still moving, the chances prevail that you'd receive many different approaches to the meaning of a town. For sure, of this town. Saugus, Massachusetts, 12 miles north of Boston on the historic North Shore.

It keeps exclaiming itself in the back of the mind, again and again and again. Saugus it says in a way that never lets go. They tell me this by poem, letter, music, you name the medium and they use it. Saugus they say.

Friends say it by poem and book, by disc or tape, in words and music.

From a corner of Cliftondale Square by Surabian's Store the recalls would spring, or from the old Morrison Drug Store on the corner of Smith Road or a house on Morton Avenue or Myrtle Street that somehow won't let go its grip even to this day. They’d come from a cliff­face up in the still woods of North Saugus or a late skate on Lily Pond or the Anna Parker when it used to be flooded for winter fun. Or from a game of playing tag on the rising form of the Post Office when it was being built in the Thirties.

All this reverie might begin with the ghost of a father's lilting voice calling across the cool air just after

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darkness started its descent. The tone of that voice, its song of airy stubbornness and care, settling its primal demand across a goodly piece of town, across Main Street to the deep end of a hay field near Gustafson's Florist (where Chuckie Shipulski lives now and where Shipwreck Ed used to live). It would cross a section of the railroad tracks leaning from Lynn through the heart of the town to Revere on the Linden Branch. It would be a voice calling more than one person home, calling more than one person to memory. With sound there comes images, perhaps faint and distant, but ever real, freewheeling a stream of consciousness. The recallers might remember a summer cottage, and little more than a shed at that, in Golden Hills or high on Henshit Mountain, having a cellar constructed underneath, getting elongated, widened, being winterized, the walls becoming warmer, becoming home.

Sometimes a clubhouse in those Thirties, in the tough times, became a full­fledged home, and stands in place yet in part tribute to its young carpenters. Frankie Parkinson and the Petitto boys among others used to talk about their memberships in such clubs, how they came by their building materials, how they got into the real estate business in the first place. Those were marvelous stories of another time, of another liberty and another persuasion; the lumber floating across Lily Pond from a special source, or hauled by sled on mid­ winter's ice, cover and darkness key words of the narratives. After a while taxes were imposed on these crude structures by the police chief, which forced the boys to move, to redraft plans, to rebuild, architects at the outset.

Among old timers, chances are a number of them might recall Blind Leonard living alone in his small shack near what is now Camp Nihan's waters, across from the North Saugus School, now a professional building at what is now the newest traffic control point in town. Leonard would walk again for them along Water and Walnut Streets, the cane tapping its steady tap, coming from the bus stop, coming from Lynn, from music, from Danvers where he visited his brother, or from another relative's house where the lights were kept low, a survivor for the longest time, a marvel for getting done what could not be done. Citizen Leonard.

Too, some of them would remember an eleven­year­old boy at the wheel of a tractor on the family farm alongside Spring Street, where the Full of Bull now sits facing the Turnpike, the sun beating down on him, sweat­generating high August at its work. (The old Ford tractor went off to war in 1942 as part of a pile of junk metal collected on the lawn of the town hall or the pile near the State Theater and the railroad tracks, becoming Corsairs and tanks and LSTs pointing straight at Normandy or the sands of Saipan or Kwajalein, keeping Saugus boys company out there in The Big Noise.) Once, they'd remember, there was a freedom and an independence and an initiative for the young to grow quickly, to do the manly thing, with whatever consequences waiting to happen. War does that, and the stretch of a town and its young people towards the next level of age. Citizens growing.

But in all of these acts of definition there would be a universal feeling underlining each approach. For the truth is you don’t grasp Saugus outright. You don’t jump in up to your knees and know right off what you’ve jumped into. You don’t get to the heart of a town as if a rapid transit has dropped you at the heartbeat’s center.

You can see a hundred pictures of what we’ve been, what we’ve come to be. Lily Pond and the dam can leap out at you, as can the Sweetser School and the Felton and the Armitage and the Mansfield and the old North Saugus School. But they’re all gone in their initial sense. The old high school is gone. The State Theater. The Adventure Car­Hop. The Drive­In Theater. All gone. Reverend Gray is gone and Father Culhane. Dave Lucey is gone and Buzz Harvey and Hazel Marison and Walter Blossom and John A.W. Pearce. Albert Moylan is gone and Vernon Evans and William Smith. And Adlington’s and Hoffman’s hardware stores. And Graham’s Market and Braid’s and Sherman’s and the Economy Store and Louis Gordon’s Tailor Shop and Joe Laura’s Barbershop and Ace Welding and Herb White’s Diner and the Slop Shop and Warnie’s Restaurant and Butler’s Drug and the Rexall and Charlie Hecht’s in the Center.

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Bill Carter’s Bar is gone and Chickland and Ludwig’s Cleaners and Heck Allen’s.

The perishable perish.

They’re all gone, veered off the face of the earth, but we’re still here.

For the time being.

We too shall pass on, yet in the meantime, in the moments of pure reverie of recall, we assess and measure and realize what we’ve become and what we came out of.

We remember what we’ve taken out of a place. Taken out of Saugus!

Through the gifts of Ellis Island, through the pouring out of people from Europe and all the continents, this little town on the North Shore in its day was becoming a little piece of America, a reflection of the larger mirror of this country. We, as a town, as a community in the truest sense, had become an amalgam at one time; but we were not complete. At the ports of Boston and New York and New Orleans through the terrible times of fever and along the cool St. Lawrence seaway, the boats unloaded their cargo, the load of precious charges destined to continue the rising of the New World. With them, of them, came the character upon which this town, as with many other towns along the North Shore, finally fixed its form and content.

The enclaves, of course, came into existence. Almost like estates of a sort, they were, like seeking like, economies of kinship, sea fares being paid, sponsorships coming into bloom, cousins coming from the Old World to help with the new farms along Walnut Street and Main Street and Vine Street and Whitney Street. They came to help in the shops and mills at the center of town and along Lincoln Avenue, and the character of East Saugus developed beside that of Cliftondale. West Cliftondale bloomed in its own way as did Golden Hills and Lynnhurst, and North Saugus being molded in its near­sovereign outland independence.

Then, eventually, with charisma, with fusion, the edges were joined and the amoebae fully assimilated.

We had, at some point, become Saugus.

Once the core of the town had come into being, once the character had been formed, and the energy flowing through it was live and vital, something else happened.

No longer was it what the people had given to the town; from its becoming Saugus, the measurement we had to make therefore came to be what we took from its being: what we took away from it when we left. It became much like looking back and trying to say what you carried away from a school you had attended, that school continuing long after you've passed through it.

This was addressed many years ago in my poem about one of Saugus' memorable characters, Frank Parkinson. The poem, “The Hill of the Blue Goose,” appearing in the Louisville Review, said in part; (This Vinegar) Hill has transport. Pieces left in Hwachon Valley of the Iron Triangle. In Verdun. On the Ho Chi Min Trail. Waters near the Marshall Islands, Sitka. In flecks of blood aged in a Walpole cell. An unmarked grave in a dead town in Iowa, or a cave wall scratched up with doom in the California Sierras. Almost near Tobruk, (where Frank Parkinson was left for dead vs. Rommel and where he walked out of that Sahara deadness to come back home. Oh, Frankie!).

All were pieces of Saugus carried away from her heartbeat. Like Lily Pond, as it was, gone!

That those taken pieces keep getting regenerated is a marvel of township. It is why Saugus is loved by so many, and by so many more who have not yet found out what they carry with them, waiting to steal away in this lifetime, to go the way of Lily Pond. ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­

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The Linnet´s Wings

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Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heav'n's joy, Sphere-born harmonious Sisters, Voice and Ver Wed your divine sounds, and mixt power emplo Dead things with inbreath'd sense able to pierce And to our high-rais'd fantasy present That undisturbed Song of pure concent, From At A Solemn Music by John Milton

Lascaux Cave Paintings

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Imprisoned by Love by

Tom Sheehan

I

will not coerce you on the matter. You can believe what you want about things that happened back in 1944, in that far off other century, but Willie Kriegsburnd, of course, never existed, never made love more than a dozen times in a secret cave in Maine with a 17-year old farmer’s daughter whose name was Emsie Burton (that stuff’s never supposed to happen), never escaped from the POW camp near Houlton (that either), never served with distinction in the 90. Leichten AfrikaAbteilung des deutschen Afrikakorps (90 Light Africa Division of the German Africa Corps) in the Sahara Desert during World War II, never contemplated murder or marriage. You can believe all that… if you want. But I wouldn’t. Take it from me.

All that said, love was afoot, loose as the phantom salmon tossing the barb from its mouth at East River Lake only a short way from Houlton or a phantom trout in a Bavarian stream near Willie’s home. Of course, it was another century and, as they say, “That’s history.”

In the dead of silence it happened, at the hour before the false dawn, the sky still bristling with stars, a low moon heating up memories, when a voice from outside echoed through the cave. For the third time of this late night encounter, Emsie had borne Willie’s weight, fearful each coupling might be the last, her grasp telling him so – and the deep rhythm coursing down through flesh and bone, running with her blood. It made way in her fingertips, in the newly-remarkable span of her thighs, in that place where her heart might have been, now knocked asunder and beating fitfully. Movies had done this to her, and stage plays, and everyday drama crawling through or exploding on those otherwise common days, all exposed to her by her mother who could have been imprisoned by the farm and its insistent, laborious demands. But wasn’t. Nor would her daughter be so shackled when it began to matter with her.

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And the young German prisoner helped with his part.

With Willie there were moments, such as this interruption, when Emsie thought not a breath was left in her lungs, the way wind left her, with a rushing noise and added expectation, like parts of an orchestra coming and going, the brass horns ringing, the violins lingering. Willie had accomplished that from the first encounter. And all of it now erupting simultaneously behind her eyeballs, seeing things that did not exist, not as yet, images of the future carved by her mind and frozen in place… just when the harsh voice rocked through the cave on the far edge of the Burton farm. The voice was raucous and metallic and she immediately recalled a King Lear play in Boston and a stagehand, a musical stagehand she supposed, for battle and storm presentation beating a large sheet metal plate hanging from the rafters with a huge rubber mallet. In row three, at her mother’s treat, she had shivered away any disbelief of the spectacle.

This night of the cave was in late August of 1944. The invasion of Europe had begun two months earlier, with measurable noise and thrust, on the coast of France, the German campaign in Africa having been shut down fifteen months earlier, and the world going topsy-turvy once again. Most of the potato crop had been picked and packed off and cellar barrels in many parts of Maine stacked with taters and salted cod. A minor chill slipped in from the northwest sly as an infiltrator, winter’s hello fully presumed, its signs known quietly. The days, one at a time, came differently, making announcements on their own selection, nature assisting, demands being made. A few of them were subtle for starters, as high-based color turned with a slow, tempered ignition. Early daylight sky behind familiar silhouettes became, by degrees, a hard blue, stark and clean-edged, as if cut deeply into cerulean ice. And pinnacled.

Singular pine trees, at a glance, stretched the Earth for all it was worth, lifting selves mightily. Mountains appeared proud as a woman’s morning breasts matching her hipline, blankets astray on the far side of sleep, night tossed aside, messages rampant and understood.

Only Emsie and her brother, who had suddenly moved to California, knew about the cave on the edge of the family farm. Nobody else had ever visited there, she was sure. But Willie had found it, all as if she had been waiting for such discovery and such a man with such a way with him.

The cave, hidden by the tangle of old trees, was on the side of a hilly ledge, and tipped slightly downward toward the entrance providing quick release for rain or ground water. This made the cave habitable though small; and good for drying out, for secrets, for love making its way at the edge of Willie’s escape.

Granite reaches seemed spawned from the cave itself, great slabs this end of the earth openly wore as signatures of another era. The cave, calved by a glacier instead of by fire in an earlier millennium, had been formed out of huge slabs, but was no longer a significantly cool place. Graffiti, a long way off, had not touched it yet… though minor fires later on had … sheets of smoke leaving a texture of smudges, burnt spots, darkened fingerprints. In other caves a world away, Pre-Adamites or Paleolithic people, perhaps, had lingered, drawn wall relics, and passed on, leaving their best interests. Willie had managed a visit to a cave discovered in 1940 in Lascaux, southwest France, before his assignment to the German Afrika Corps in the Sahara. He was an amateur spelunker and Emsie believed he was born for this cave, though few people knew about it, probably including those Pre-Adamites or Paleolithic peoples.

Pure fate was on her side.

But now, before the dawn flash, someone else knew: Elwood Burton, the owner of the threatening, baritone voice, a voice loaded with hate, had barbs buried in each consonant, bringing bait loaded with vitriol and hate.

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“Whomsoever’s in that damned hole better get their frigging ass out of there right now else I’ll fill it with enough buckshot to make ‘em a decent and heavy burial. Mark my words, Heinie Nazi.”

His voice was louder than any Panzer sergeant’s and Willie Kriegsburnd stiffened in place.

Burton continued: “I’m a town constable and can shoot any escaped POW prisoner, and I suspect you’re the one they’ve been looking for. You don’t fool me none. I had my fill of you guys in World War One and I ain’t taking any more of it. Not on my property. Not by a whisker. Not on these days. You hear me, boy? Not by a whisker.”

The silence did not last long. “I don’t know how you got out of there, but I sure can show you the way back in.” A sense of joy ran full tilt with his words, a hard joy, celebratory, as if he was also saying to a ranking officer at the POW camp, “Here’s your escaped prisoner, Sir, returned at my hand.” With that said, he might even salute.

Burton’s daughter, Emsie, 17, bordering on lovely, blue-eyed and blonde, curved galore, dreamy but spontaneous, thrill still random in her, quickly draped her hand over Willie’s mouth. “Don’t say anything, Willie. That’s my father out there. I’ll go. If he beats me, don’t hurt him, promise me that. Don’t try to kill like you did in the desert. I remember what you said about Gazala and Tobruk and El Alamein. How you were captured. I know you’re glad it’s over. We’re both out of the war now. Promise not to hurt him. He doesn’t know any better.”

At those words Willie’s right hand was cupping Emsie’s breast, her elegance and forgiveness encapsulating him. His English was imperfect, but she could understand him, piece it together with apparent ease, smile continuously, touch back. He said, “No officer ever told me I’d meet a girl like you. I am filled. I do not want not to release the riches in my hand. But that voice out there is more than a threat. It tells me I might never touch you again. God forbid that, no, not ever again.” Such thoughts rushed him quicker than any image of the prison camp and what was promised him anew because of this aborted escape. “Never have I known this kind of sweetness. The softness you bear. The magic that passes into me from a mere girl with arctic blue eyes and dimpled cheeks and artistic hands. Whose flanks swallow me truly.”

She shivered again and deepness resounded in him for the first time in his life, a bell ringing for all it was worth, pushing at his skin as if it were to break through and shatter him. “Oh, Emsie, pieces of my soul are being cut to pieces. If I were to die, I swear I’d never let go.” But Emsie, even at hearing her father’s voice and ever at control, guided his hands in a last pass at mystery, to that near elsewhere where other matters had already concluded.

“Whatever happens, Willie, don’t you forget me. Don’t you dare. Not ever.”

They had enjoyed two weeks of being lovers, two weeks of tempest and tribulation, two weeks of discovery, the old and the new. She had been told everything. Willie had escaped from the POW camp when he followed, at a discreet distance, a Kommando officer who had fooled the Americans into thinking he was only a dumb foot soldier. All through his young war, Willie had been led by such men. For the early years in the army the future was always with the man leading him in battle. Supposedly, that future had changed.

When Emsie’s father yelled at the mouth of the cave, darkness had molded everything but Willie’s hand. There, that elegance of the lingering breast kept shivering back at him, the messages lasting until that precise moment. A ball of breath, in his chest, held its place, the hunger frozen in form, swearing to last forever. He kissed her one last time and saw the whole movie developing right in front of his eyes. It was all black and white and ran quickly, in a newsreel fashion, with scenes leaping place to place.

Emsie, in her own rush at recapture, saw again the flash of her own recent history, her angled views of

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Willie Kriegsburnd from the first moment he had dropped off the tail end of the army truck weeks earlier in her father’s yard. She felt all the righteous signals the moment her eyes drew level to this young prisoner brought to the farm on the large truck, along with other German prisoners, to bring in the potato crop. All the commanding parts of her body had been screaming for something like this for months on end. The other parts did not count. Reality, at length, stood on its hind legs, breathed, moved as graciously as a dancer, understood what was about him. This handsome blond with the wide shoulders began to play the rhythms in her bloodstream.

Announcements leaped out of her. She saw where they landed, down in the fishing hole depths of his eyes where something frolicked, counted hours, played back a chorus of answers no other soul in the

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Combat of Centaurs by Odilon Redon

Tom Sheehan

universe was privy to. Knowledge leaped upon her, found its way home to belief.

The prisoners had climbed down from the tail end of the six-by truck, mostly looking like roustabouts from fairs or carnivals. And there stood blond and wide-shouldered Willie Kriegsburnd, young POW, starkly blue-eyed and yet somehow innocent in what mild measurement she could muster, it being enough for her.

The only place of comfort for her in this whole terrible world, now hurling pieces of hot metal at each other from one end of the planet to the next, was contemplating a handsome German war prisoner, looking lost in the depths of Maine. A handsome boy, indeed, extracted from the hell of his war.

Her heart leaped, a bit in sympathy, a bit in lust, a bit of curiosity riding her for the next few days.

The wide shoulders had come first to her, the near unreal span of them compared to what was left of

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the young male population in town… all the others called to war… and his eyes so much like the eyes she had last seen on her Golden Lab with his collar hooked on a tree being driven in the rush of the Allagash River’s white waters, a look she would never forget. As Emsie might have said to anybody who’d listen to her, she was ready for Willie who, obvious to her, was appointed at this time to come into her life, safely and wholly extracted from the war.

And Elwood Burton, scene stealer, yelled again; “I ain’t gonna say it again, mister. Git’n your ass outta there is the best part of advice you can expect, ‘cause there ain’t gonna be no more.” Buckshot came from the shotgun burst off a rock outside the cave, and the noisy blast bounced into the cave, ricocheting off granite surfaces worn smooth by a hundred millenniums. “I knowed you was in there last night. I just waited up for day comin’.”

Emsie whispered in Willie’s ear, “We’re not done yet, Willie. I’ll see that true.” She moved against his hand, and then guided it in a last touch. “You remember me, Willie, no matter how long it takes. You remember me.”

Rolling away from her lover, she sat up and yelled out. “Don’t shoot any more, Pa. I’m coming out.

Willie and I are friends.” She could have sung those words, but her father would certainly be tone deaf to their meaning. ** When Willie Kriegsburnd followed Jaeger Traklet out of the POW camp at Houlton, by less than a half hour, he was, for all his intents, the dumbest of the POWs in the camp. The main thing Willie had in his favor was he knew who Jaeger Traklet was, the Kommando colonel in masquerade, who had completely fooled his American captors into believing he was nothing but another dumb soldier, unaware of the big picture. The Kommando Traklet was the ace up Willie’s sleeve.

Traklet had no idea Willie was following him and had generally ignored the comrade who openly admitted, to anyone who was listening, that he was just a dog soldier, a foot slogger only obeying directions of his officers. Back in Edenkoben in the Rhineland, Willie’s father was a mere cobbler, struggling in that small town, living veritably from foot to mouth. Willie, at an early age, knew he was destined for the same task; the only other choice was to break out and work in the vineyards. Oftentimes looking at his future, he fostered a joy in hunting and fishing and was comfortable in the forests and in mysterious caves and by the water. All these provided escape for him, never dreaming of being a soldier, until the army pulled him into the ranks. From then on he followed where he was pointed. Now, at a distance, in all the stealth imaginable, he had followed the Kommando officer, who had carefully planned every step of his escape from the POW camp, through the broken fence, the twisted wires, and the open culvert under the last barrier.

All Willie carried with him was a batch of pepper wrapped in a handkerchief and carried in a paper bag.

During his potato picking that August, on various farms in the Houlton area, Willie had found the hidden cave at the edge of the Burton place, and had stashed stolen supplies during a month of odd labor, potato picking and daily intrigue… first he placed water in odd containers in the cave, and scrounged food from farmer’s wives or daughters, that would last at least a week, perhaps time enough for any concentrated pursuit to slacken. One old map of the state of Maine came into his hands at the back of a barn, and that too rested in the cave.

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The pepper was for the dogs that would follow them. He had seen Traklet for weeks take away from meals every bit of pepper he could manage. And Willie followed suit, knowing what the pepper was for. Let the dogs come; all he had to do was to get to the cave, live on his stored supplies, move on later when the pepper did the trick on the dogs, the chase cooled, and the Americans went back to their laid-back ways.

During the escape he dwelled at times on the daughter at the Burton farm who smiled at him once or twice, as if a message was being sent. Emsie was one of prettiest girls he’d seen in America, and she had a good shape, worked hard and was only seventeen. He admired all that in her, and her smile. It was evident to him very early that she turned her back when he was busy at secret things, as if she was eager to help him, or at least averting her eyes; she’d not be a good witness if he fled. With no young men on the farm, Willie was sure he was attractive to her, as she was attracted to him. He began to think about her in that way. Once, when he went into the barn and stayed there for ten minutes, she had casually walked in and began to talk to him.

Willie’s English was good enough to be understood, and his leanings for her were clearly pronounced.

When she stood close enough for him to kiss her, as if daring him, he did. Her arms wrapped about him and she pressed herself against him. “Willie,” she said, “you are the strongest one ever to work here. I like that. I like you, but we have to be careful. My father would beat me if he saw me. He wouldn’t understand. He never does.”

“You make me dream about you,” Willie said, as he hugged her tightly. “I dream about you every night back at the camp. When can I be with you? I do not want you to get into any trouble, because I am meaning to escape from the camp and hide out in the woods. The camp is a horrible place. No privacy. No women, no you, it makes everybody crazy, the way simple things go out of kilter. Things go unbalanced. It happens every day. The men are remembering wives or sweethearts. I have nobody but you to think about. I can be crazy for you, but I don’t want you to get in trouble, you work so hard and so good. You work as hard as any man I’ve ever seen, but you always look better than any of them to me.”

There was no argument that she’d be in good hands with Willie Kriegsburnd. The thought went through her sure as a vow, and as solid. This early in life, she had found her man. Revelations come to the young too, she thought. And she swore she could see the future, could touch it, taste it, and bring it to bed with her every night. She hugged him again, in the barn, out of sight of the entire universe itself. She also swore the yellow-green eyes of two horses in separate stalls were looking at her sadly.

In the cave, dark as any night cell and no hope for starlight, Willie imagined what lurked around him.

He conjured up a vast array of shapes and shadows in the corners of his eyes.

The odd apparitions of youth came back with their opaque being; he saw things that were not there.

Emsie, of course, began her intrusions, three nights in a row assailing him with her trim body, the smell of her skin even in the field under the sun. He would know her any place, could smell her on the thinnest sheet of air. It was the third night, the farm quiet, no stars because of cloud cover, that Willie dared to think about leaving the cave. The little bag of pepper, which had come in so handy with the dogs in chase, was as good as a weapon. He kept it in a pocket of his pants, and could smell the aroma once in a while. As he was making a decision to at least get some exercise, he heard the first odd noise, first of rock against rock, slight, secretive, then a rustle of clothes, and a small waft of air came against his face and he smelled Emsie, knew she was entering the cave, with the first sound had moved the rock at the entrance.

“Willie,” she said, “it’s me, Emsie. I’m coming in.” Now he could really hear the rustle of her clothes and he caught her scent on a small draft of air, as if she had sent it on to him, to tease him or find acceptance.

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“I know you’ve been hiding here. I’m the only one who knows this place, besides my brother, and he’s in California now, working on planes. Even my father doesn’t know. He’d skin me alive if he knew I was in here. Would have done it years ago, too. So we never told him. I haven’t been in here since my brother Jimmy left. He had to go. My father treated him like a disaster, kept after him forever. Jimmy was never going to be like him. I’m staying, have stayed for my mother or I would have followed Jimmy to the West Coast. I could be making planes that are fighting your army, your friends. I hate war. It’s so cruel. We should all be friends, but I’m afraid we can’t be friends with Hitler. Even some of your own army officers tried to kill him. Why did they do that?"

“Can you stay with me?"

“Only until 3 in the morning or about then. He’s always up by 5; hard work is all he knows.”

“Do you want to stay?”

“That’s why I came.” I’ve been dreaming about you. Like every night. I don’t think of you as an enemy. I can’t explain it all, but I had to come. I knew you were here the first night, but I didn’t want you to get caught. There have been soldiers everywhere, even dogs sniffing around, but they didn’t come near this cave. They went on past the end of the wall and into the woods at the end of the field.”

She was in his arms and her essence assailed him. It was as if she was all exposed with her clothes still on. ** “Last warnin’ to the pair of ya. Git out’n here now fore I let loose. Emsie, you come first, girl. I ain’t meaning’ to shoot ya, but I sure am itchin’ with this trigger.”

“Pa, we’re coming together. Don’t dare shoot. I’m not letting go of him. I love him, Pa; I don’t care if he is a German. He’s the man I want to marry some day.”

“And let me be the laughin’ stock of the whole town. Not on your bottom dollar.”

“You use their muscle to get your potatoes, and you’ll spend the earnings, but you won’t listen to what fits me.”

Emsie came out first, as she pulled Willie along behind her coming out of the cave. She stood up shielding Willie, directly in front of the shotgun. “I love him, Pa. Don’t make any mistake about that. I’ve spent near a week with him, right here. Don’t spoil anything, Pa.” “I’m a lawman. He’s an escaped prisoner of war.” As he yelled at her, her took one hand off the gun and slapped her hard on the face. Willie leaped at him. The shotgun went off and Willie, wounded for the first time since entering the army, screamed in pain. He fell to the ground. Emsie screamed at her father and then pulled the gun out of his hands. He had never shot a man before, not even in France in that long ago war.

Shouts came from at them from the farmhouse and barn. Dogs barked. An engine, loud in the predawn, roared down on them from a service road.

Soldiers came. They put Willie in the back of the truck. Emsie kissed him goodbye as three soldiers laughed at her. “He’s the goods, is he? Nothing but a Kraut. Ya ought to know better. They’ll take care of him now; probably knock a rape charge against him.”

The talker, a sergeant, looked at Emsie’s father. “How’s that sit with you, sir, a rape charge? We’ll make it tight. Make it stick. Me and these others practically came right up on them, him, in the act. In a

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dark cave to boot. Be a piece of cake making it stick. It might be a little easier for you around here, knowing what the neighbors’ll make of all this, a loose farm girl you know.”

“Go to hell with your rape charge,” said Emsie, “and your noise about a loose farm girl. I’ll bet you weren’t so lucky, not around here anyway. I love him. He’s going to be my husband some day when the war is over.” For one bare moment, she was an historian looking down the road in front of her. “All wars get over, and friends get made up again. You’ll see.” She stared at Willie leaning out of the back of the truck. “Willie, I’ll love you all the way until this war gets over. You remember where I am. I’ll be here. If they try to charge you with rape, I’ll go to the newspapers myself, or I’ll go down to the camp and make hell for them. You’re going to be my husband someday.”

“Not going to be no husband, not on my farm, he ain’t,” her father said.

The sergeant added his own forecast, “We’ll ship him so far from here, he’ll never find his way back.

Does that suit you, sir? That make it up to you for what’s happened here?”

Emsie remembered the sergeant was the one who had twisted Willie’s arm half up his backside when he shoved him into the truck, with pleasure riding his smile, and knew his face would forever be at call. At that moment she also realized that he would share space with Willie in her mind. It reinforced a belief she held that love could often be unfair.

Resolute, a small storm riding her backside, anger making way its entry, Emsie turned her back on the sergeant, and leveled another broadside at her father. “Then, I’ll just have to go off like my brother did, drive off to the other side of the country just because he didn’t see things the way you did.” Her father saw his daughter at that instant as solid as the rocks about them.

She turned to her new friend and lover, hope more alive on her face than ever before, eyes vibrant and reaching, casting a sense of ownership, and yet accompanied by an oath in her words. That’s when Elwood Burton saw the second materialization of his wife for the first time in years, when Emsie said, “If I ain’t here when you come back, Willie, I’ll be in Orinda, California with my brother Jimmy. Jimmy Burton, Orinda, California, so far from here nobody else can get there but you, and nobody else wanted there but you.” She nodded at the sergeant, “Let this man make a liar out of the truth and see where it gets him before I get done with all this.”

She threw Willie a kiss.

In the pale remnants of early morning she was an upright sign of the new day, and over one shoulder, as if called on for dual announcement, the dawn flash leaped up past a crowned hill and stressed her singularity.

Emsie Burton was, without sergeant stripes or parental authority, in charge of the future looming in front of them, and the escaped and recaptured German prisoner of war, staring at her over the tailgate of a six-by army ....... truck, believed he was seeing life already unfolding for him from where it had been sent off by another smaller god of the universe. He had met so few of them.

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NEW WORLD POETRY

Juana de Ibarbourou By

Stephen Zelnick

High school Literature teachers could do worse than to start with Juana de Ibarbourou’s poetry. She wrote love poems -- sweet and lyrical and sexually tinged -- in her youth, and more somber poems of love and loss in her maturity. Her poems are formally arranged, musical, with dutiful rhyme and regular metrics. She excels at sincerity, with imaginative turns of uncomplicated symbolic reference, and settled with a voice appropriate to feelings. Her perspective is not much wider than the devotions of the young, with infrequent notice of history and politics or the ironic twists of an uncertain future. The moment is emphatically “what I am feeling now and have a perfect right to feel, no matter what others may say.” And, truth to say, that flight into

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the unrepentant “now” is what many poetry readers hope for.

[Pic] [Uruguay is a small country, in the south of South America, bounded by Argentina and Brazil. Unlike its neighbors, it was never the object of a rush for gold or plantation riches. Its climate is temperate and its land suitable for cattle. It’s extensive coast invites maritime trade. Uruguay is the second smallest country in South America, a mere 68,000 sq. miles, with a population of 3.3 million, 1.8 million of whom live in Montevideo. A middle-class country, Uruguay ranks high in wealth and income distribution and is one of the most liberal nations on earth.]

She was born in Melo, Uruguay, in 1892 and baptized Juana Fernandez Morales. Her family was well-to-do, and she benefitted from the freedom of modest wealth, without pressing expectations. She roamed in woods and fields, as her poetry delightfully reports. Juana was stylish and movie-star beautiful. At twenty, she married Captain Lucas Ibarbourou, moved with him to Montevideo, and enjoyed a quiet and loving marriage until his death in 1942. In 1929, Uruguay name her “Juana de America” in honor of her growing fame in Latin America.

[Pic] [Ibarbourou’s face appears prominently around her poetry and on stamps and currency in Uruguay. There is no mystery why this would be so.]

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There are few hints of trouble in her biography. After she burst upon the scene with Las Lenguas de Diamante (1919) and Raiz Salvaje (1922), her poetry trails off in volume and intensity, and then pauses in 1930. During that hiatus, she travels, accepts plaudits, meets notable artists in Europe, and becomes a member of the arts establishment in Uruguay. She writes radio plays, prose fiction, and works for children.

Her poetic voice falls silent until 1950, when after her husband’s death she finds new themes and a darker voice. Her later poems are more tightly organized, with less obvious symbolic references. There is more light irony and delicate hints of anguish. Her mature work continues to be personal, even though Uruguay in her era endured painful economic depression, WWII fears, worker unrest and growing violence. She dies in 1979 in a Uruguay rocked by Tupamaros insurgency and the hard boot of military repression. She is not Neruda, the radical Uruguayan historian Eduardo Galeano, or the rebel leader Jose Mujica, who would serve years later as Uruguay’s beloved President.

[Pic] [ Jose Alberto Mujica Cordano (“Pepe” to most) served two terms as President before retiring recently. He refused the opulent trappings of office, living modestly, driving his battered VW, and returning the bulk of his income to the nation. He had been a Tupamaros leader and was imprisoned. While rejecting violence, he retained his Socialist commitments and put them into effect

Juana de Ibarbourou is sometimes grouped with two other poets of her time and region – Gabriela Mistral (Chile) and Alfonsina Storni (Argentina). They offer a simple schema of social class and poetic focus. Storni differed most from her Uruguayan contemporary. Storni’s poetry is dramatically complex, feminist and sexual (The Linnet’s Wings, Summer 2015). Alfonsina is theatrical. Her style is not musical, but founded on character in dramatic action. She mocks romance, in our modern style. Born to a middle-class commercial family that failed, she had to live by her wits. While no classic beauty, she was vivacious, engaging lovers, struggling to raise a child out of wedlock, and spending evenings singing tango in Buenos Aires bars. While often mentioned together, the conventional Juana and bohemian Alfonsina represent divergent female fates.

[Pic] [Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) was an educator, and leading advocate for the children of poverty. She was the first Latin American writer awarded the Nobel Prize (1945).]

Gabriela Mistral was born in dusty poverty in an Andean village in northern Chile. The Catholic Church educated her, and she became a rural schoolteacher, devoted life-long to educating the poor children of Latin

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America. Unlike her bourgeois sister-poets, romantic love played little role in her art. Like Ibarbourou, Mistral was a devout Christian and wrote extensive children’s verse. Racial antagonism and the plight of the poor supply regular themes in her work. Mistral engaged her feelings in her politics and helped found UNESCO. She advocated public education and recognition for women’s social roles throughout Latin America. Even today, one finds schools named for her and multiple editions of her cradle songs. Gabriela was poor and plain, an artist of varying styles and great talent, reaching out beyond personal concerns.

Ibarbourou’s early poetry is often giddy with youthful spirit and gay carelessness. “The Sweet Miracle” (Las Lenguas de Diamante, 1919) is a delicious comfit of a song: El DULCE MILAGRO

The Sweet Miracle

¿Que es esto? ¡Prodigio! Mis manos florecen.

Rosas, rosas, rosas a mis dedos crecen.

Mi amante besóme las manos, y en ellas, ¡oh gracia! brotaron rosas como estrellas.

What’s this? Prodigious! My hands flower.

Roses, roses, roses grow at my fingers.

My lover kissed my hands, and in them, gracious! roses broke out like stars.

Y voy por la senda voceando el encanto y de dicha alterno sonrisa con llanto y bajo el milagro de mi encantamiento se aroman de rosas las alas del viento.

I walk the path proclaiming the spell and smile from joy, then weep and under the miracle of my enchantment scents of roses fill the wind’s wings.

Y murmura al verme la gente que pasa: "¿No veis que está loca? Tornadla a su casa. ¡Dice que en las manos le han nacido rosas y las va agitando como mariposas!"

And people who see me pass murmur: “Not seen the crazy girl returning home?

She says that roses grew in her hands and they are fluttering like butterflies!”

¡Ah, pobre la gente que nunca comprende un milagro de éstos y que sólo entiende Que no nacen rosas más que en los rosales y que no hay más trigo que el de los trigales!

Oh, how poor are those who never grasp this sort of miracle and understand only that roses grow on rose bushes and wheat in fields of wheat!

Que requiere líneas y color y forma, y que sólo admite realidad por norma.

Que cuando uno dice: "Voy con la dulzura", de inmediato buscan a la criatura.

Those who require lines and color and form, and admit reality only by norm. Those who, when one says: “I go with gentleness,” look around to find her.

Que me digan loca, que en celda me encierren que con siete llaves la puerta me cierren, que junto a la puerta pongan un lebrel, carcelero rudo carcelero fiel.

Those who call me crazy, and would lock me in a cell with seven keys, and place a greyhound near the door, a rude trustworthy jailer.

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Cantaré lo mismo: "Mis manos florecen.

Rosas, rosas, rosas a mis dedos crecen". ¡Y toda mi celda tendrá la fragancia And all my cell will fill with the fragrance de un inmenso ramo de rosas de Francia! huge bouquet of roses from France!”

Still, I will sing: “My hands grow flowers, Roses, roses, roses spring from my fingers.”

of a

The poem rollicks with childish glee, served on a platter of simple syntax and juvenile rhymes – florecen/crecen; rosas/mariposas; rosales/trigalos – and flares of excitement – “Que es esto?” “!oh gracia!”. Two pairs create things magically [Pic] out of rhyme alone – “lebrel/fiel”, a character invented for the [Ibarbourou reads her poems at the Legislative Palace in rhyme – and the delicious “fragrancia/Francia” that is sheer Montevideo, before the ceremony honoring her as “Juana silliness, a perfect expression of carefree youth, love, and de America” in August, 1929.] fancifulness.

Millionaires Take myofhand.

Let’s go out in such the rain “Millionarios” (Raiz Salvaje, 1922) imagines the wealthiest man the village envying joy: bare-headed, lightly dressed, no umbrellas, wind in our hair, caressing our bodies -Millonarios forgetful, refreshed, and washed clean.

Tómame de la mano. Vámonos a la lluvia Let neighbors laugh! It’s just we’re young descalzos y ligeros de ropa, sin paraguas, and both love the rain, con el cabello al viento y el cuerpo a la caricia we go to be happy in simple joy, oblicua, refrescante y menuda, del agua. two loving sparrows cooing down the road. ¡Que rían los vecinos! Puesto que somos jóvenes There are fields, a road of acacias, and the y los dos nos amamos y nos gusta la lluvia, sumptuous estate of that poor gent, vamos a ser felices con el gozo sencillo the fat millionaire, who with all his gold, de un casal de gorriones que en la vía se arrulla. could not buy us one gram of the treasure, Más allá están los campos y el camino de acacias inefable, supreme, that God has given us: y la quinta suntuosa de aquel pobre señor to be agile, young, and full of love. millonario y obeso, que, con todos sus oros, no podría comprarnos ni un gramo del tesoro inefable y supremo que nos ha dado Dios: ser flexibles, ser jóvenes, estar llenos de amor.

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Awakening wouldexemplifies tame the golden hexameter, Thirty years later, “Amenecer” (Oro y Tormenta, I1956), her subdued spirit:the notebook’s lines, by finding the song that opens the sign of enchantment in my breast AMANECER in the first light of the new day.

El áureo hexámetro o la cuaderna vía domar quisiera para hallar el canto que abre en mi pecho el signo del encanto en la primera luz del nuevo día.

How to speak of my bud of happiness, the clear yolk of snug pleasure, and even the twisted braid of fright when the dove glimpses the serpent?

¿Cómo decir mi nardo de alegría, la clara yema del ceñido acanto, y hasta el hilado treno del espanto de la paloma que la sierpe espía?

How express the valley, the crushed spirit, and the rush of hurried hunger, my breath, the mist, turned cold,

¿Cómo decir el valle, la majada, el recental de hambre apresurada, mi aliento, en humo, al frío convertido,

the profound sensation of life, in the brief momento, as night escapes before the sun once more is burnished?

la sensación profunda de la vida en el lento minuto de la huída de la noche, ante el sol recién bruñido?

Here the speaker begs for what comes easily in youth. The poet seeks lines to fit feelings, words now a sign of enchantment rather than enchanted themselves. She waits for the “brief sensation of life”, a mere glimpse of youth’s joy. The poem is highly crafted and packed tight with imagery carried by consistent symbolic architecture. The second quatrain is nothing like her earlier verse, offering little gems – “la clara yema del ceñido acanto” (“the clear yoke of snug pleasure”); and “el hilado treno del espanto” (“the twisted braid of fright”). And “el recental de hambre apresurada” (“the rush of hurried hunger”). As with most of her later work, Ibarbourou casts her charms within the comforting confines of the classical sonnet, its order enforced Wild Root by the antique simile of dawn and emotional awakening.

It’s still stuck in myskill eyesin her earlier work: “Raiz Salvaje” also the title of her 1922 volume, demonstrates growing the vision of this wagon with wheat that crossed by, wobbling and heavy, RAIZ SALVAJE sscattering bits along the road.

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Me ha quedado clavada en los ojos la visión de ese carro de trigo que cruzó rechinante y pesado sembrando de espigas el recto camino.

You don’t think I’d be laughing now? Well, you don’t know in what deep thoughts I now wander!

¡No pretendas ahora que ría! ¡Tu no sabes en qué hondos recuerdos estoy abstraida!

From the bottom of my soul arises the sweet fruit taste of your lips.

Even now my tanned and weathered skin gives out fragrances of threshed wheat.

Desde el fondo del alma me sube un sabor de pitanga a los labios.

Tiene aún mi epidermis morena no sé que fragancias de trigo emparvado.

Ah, I wanted you to come with me to sleep one night in the fields, to pass the night till day-break in your arms beneath a tree’s wild canopy!

¡Ay, quisiera llevarte conmigo a dormir una noche en el campo y en tus brazos pasar hasta el día bajo el techo alocado de un árbol!

I am still that same country girl you drew down beside you years ago

Soy la misma muchacha salvaje que hace años trajiste a tu lado.

It’s the sort of thing D. H. Lawrence would have loved, and not just for the hearty lust but for the evocation of the country-side, that “wagon with wheat” left rumbling in the imagination, where every scattered bit is treasured despite the years. The miracle of that perfect moment preserved in weathered skin that continues to emit wheat’s fragrances.

[Pic] [Ibarbourou loved her early years and her free wandering in woods and fields.]

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The Hour Take me now though it’s early and Iamong carry fresh dahliasofinpassion: my hand.

“La Hora” (Las Lenguas de Diamantes, 1919) belongs her poems

LA HORA

Take me now, the day so sombre, With my hair a moody mess.

Tómame ahora que aun es temprano y que llevo dalias nuevas en la mano.

Now that I have sweet flesh, clear eyes and skin of roses.

Tómame ahora que aún es sombría esta taciturna cabellera mía.

Now that the quick spingtime sandal plants its light step.

Ahora que tengo la carne olorosa y los ojos limpios y la piel de rosa.

Now that my lips ring with smiles like a bell struck hurriedly

Ahora que calza mi planta ligra la sandalia viva de la primavera.

Afterwards … ah, I know later, I will have none of this.

Ahora que mis labios repican la risa como una campana sacudida a prisa.

Then your desire for me will fade, like an offering placed at a mausoleum.

Después..., ¡ah, yo sé que ya nada de eso mas tarde tendré!

Take me now though it is early and I have the riches of lavender in my hand!

Que entonces inútil será tu deseo, como ofrenda puesta sobre un mausoleo.

Today, and not later. Before the night turns the fresh blossom musty.

¡Tómame ahora que aún es temprano y que tengo rica de nardos la mano!

Today, not tomorrow. Oh Love! Don’t you see that vines will creep upon the cypress?

Hoy, y no más tarde. Antes que anochezca y se vuelva mustia la corola fresca.

Hoy, y no mañana. ¡Oh amante! ¿no ves que la enredadera crecerá ciprés?

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This female “Carpe Diem” is brisk and urgent. The thoughts move excitedly and hit upon fresh images: “sweet flesh, /clear eyes and skin of roses”; “the quick springtime sandal”; and the delightful “my lips ring with smiles/ like a bell struck hurriedly.” Even somber, the speaker’s mind is radiant: “your desire for me will fade, /like an offering placed at a mausoleum.” ThePantheism speed and precision of these images describe the flash of mind of the woman mad for love.

Such pleasure, stretched out on the earth, under the morning sun,imaginative warm as a bed.

“Pantheism” (Las Lenguas de Diamante, 1919), while more sedate is alive with thinking. A young Deep inside, what life brightens my womb!possibilities woman, still aglow with love-making, feels first the warm pulse of earth, then senses the magical Who knows what diamond flame hides here! moving in her womb: Who knows what treasure, at a glance, will surge from this very place of repose, perhaps the living gold of a seminal era, or the live emerald of some lush tree!

Panteísmo Siento un acre placer en tenderme en la tierra, bajo el sol matutino tibia como una cama.

Bajo mi cuerpo, ¡cuánta vida mi vientre encierra! ¡Quién sabe qué diamante esconde aquí su llama!

Who knows what stupendous rich seed blossoms now deep in my burning body!

Fuse of the future, scattering to the winds in summer nights, clear and murmuring,

¡Quién sabe qué tesoro, dentro de una mirada, surgirá de este mismo lugar donde reposo, si será el oro vivo de una era sembrada, o la viva esmeralda de algún árbol frondoso!

the heat of my flesh, scented with roses, fragrance of lillies, scented with thoughts.

¡Quién sabe qué estupenda y dorada simiente ha de brotar ahora bajo mi cuerpo ardiente!

Futuro pebetero que esparcirá a los vientos, en las noches de estío, claras y rumorosas, el calor de mi carne hecho aroma de rosas, fragancia de azucenas, y olor de pensamientos.

[Pic] It is rare in her poetry for Ibarbourou to link physical [Stately and composed, Ibarbourou came to nature, her bodily sense, the prospects of history look every bit the refined poet.]

(“Futuro pebetero que esparcirá a los vientos”), and the flesh as a kind of thinking ... and with it, the ebullience of hope embedded in the now.

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Loneliness Show me your pale face, in rising mist.

Bring me each day the rhythm of your dream.

In allphase. the gossamer of darkness mist, Oro y Tormenta (1956) represents Ibarbourou’s mature “Soledad” grieves fororher lost beloved -classical, inventive, composed, the poet in commandmy ofdoleful her art:reverie envelops me.

SOLEDAD Me da tu rostro pálido, la espuma.

Me trae el díel ritmo de tu sueño.

En todo fleco de tiniebla o bruma se me arrebuja mi dolido ensueño.

Triste, mi queja, flor de zarza, eleva la pesadumbre de ser casi espina.

El aire, un grito redondeado lleva más allá de mi casa en la colina.

Sad, my complaint, a barbed flower, rousing the nightmare of being like a thorn.

In the air an echoing cry rises once again from my house on the hill.

“Where are you, my master?” goes this cry, an echo threading from this infinite world of wind and light like sifted flour.

It comes to you, where absence never leaves, where the cry remains dark-shadowed,

Donde estás tú, el dueño, va ese grito, brizna del eco, entre el infinito mundo del viento y de la luz cernida.

Llega hasta ti, donde no va la ausente, la que siempre se queda oscuramente, olvidada entre un pliegue de la vida.

This elegy forms at the boundary “entre el infinito/ mundo del viento y de la luz cernida” and an “oscuramente” mundo “donde no va la ausente.” The image of sewing slides gently through the poem: the “gossamer of darkness”, the cry that “threads” from here to there; and the “pleated folds of life” as if the poem

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was come upon in this casual domestic act. Her memory pricks, thorn-like, recalling the crisis on discovering her beloved’s sudden death, an echoing cry that cannot be silenced. Her journey does not console but arrives at the obscure nether world “where absence Autumn never leaves.” It is a sad poem, quiet, Southern bringing no relief.

Autumn arrives with mint and plantain, [Pic] our southern Autumn: green lemons, [She appears on a common denomination of Uruguayan currency, a daily--presence.] bushels of oranges unripe in April, the last grapes come crashing “OTOÑO DEL SUR” shows precise observation, delightful whimsy, language: against the first --and theplay tart of mandarins.

Tweed jackets cover us just right, OTOÑO DEL SUR with maternal assistance, right where the sharp wind waits in ambush to prick you, Con menta y con llantén llega el Otoño, nuestro Otoño del Sur: verdes limones, and on your return, the sweet warmth gravidez del naranjo, Abril bisoño, of the sheltering house, the tenderness últimas uvas dándose encontrones of the fire, of the blanket well woven, con las primeras, agrias mandarinas.

La chaqueta de tweed cobra derecho de maternal auxilio, en las esquinaste donde el picante viento está en acecho,

the love of those souls who guard us, and the vigilance of gnomes, masters of life’s small graces.

y retorna la cálida dulzura de la casa abrigada, la ternura del fuego, de la manta bien tejida, el amor de los seres que guardamos, y la vigencia de los duendes, amos de las menudas gracias de la vida.

The poem opens with a cascading inventory of autumn fruits we have enjoyed -- the poem supposes “agrias mandarinas”, and the late grapes rushing in upon the earliest springtime crop (right across a stanza barrier).

The portrait of dressing warm against the cold, packed in against the wind’s icy ambush, and the sheltering hearth is deftly sketched. The fanciful gnomes -- “amos/ de las menuas gracias de la vida” -- cap the magic.

The poem moves rapidly, even in the languor of memory and the riotous play of sound.

“Paz”, an anti-war poem, is a rare instance where she treats the wider world and its pain: Paz Peace La materna sombrilla de los pinos

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entre las rojas flechas de febrero y mis hombros lucientes; ah, qué finos, los pañuelos del aire del acero.

shields my shining shoulders from February’s harsh arrows; ah, how fine your handkerchiefs of air and iron.

El agua se ha llenado de espejitos.

Todo, sobre la tierra, centellea. ¡La bulliciosa tierra de los gritos, el mordisco, la zarpa y la pelea!

The water has filled with tiny mirrors.

Sparkling all over the earth, quieting the cries of pain of the noisy world, the bite and claw of warfare!

Pero tú dulcificas la batalla, como un ángel sin alas y sin malla, espléndido, de brazos poderosos.

But you sweeten the battle, like a splendid angel, not only with wings, fine-woven, but powerful arms.

Hasta el viento se vuelve de azucenas y hasta las fieras me parecen buenas, si tercias en la riña de los osos.

With you, the wind’s blast turns to lilies and even beasts seem good, in a world so ripped apart by quarreling bears.

“Paz” is an apostrophe to “Peace”, figuring it in things both diaphanous and iron-tough. Thus, peace is a “materna sombrilla” (a mothering pine) and also a shield against “February’s fierce arrows”. The airyneedled boughs seem porous, a handkerchief, but provide a sturdy shield. The image returns in the first tercet with “fine-woven wings” wielded by “powerful arms.” The image suggests public statuary. The poem’s second image of tiny mirrors sparkling out to quiet “the cries of pain of the noisy world” invites a magic transformation of “el mordisco, la zarpa y la pelea.” Peace, as the breeze filtered by the pines, turns the cold blast of winter winds to lilies and pacifies the raging beasts of violence, in a world “ripped apart by quarreling bears.”

“Como una ascua d Miel” is much nearer Ibarbourou’s strength and shows her boldness in leaving a brilliant and tangled image to bloom in the reader’s mind: COMO UNA ASCUA DE MIEL

Like an Ember of Honey

De la brasa de amor que me consume se alza la rosa de tu epifanía.

Canto de gozo en la mitad del día.

Sagrada columnita del perfume.

From the ember of love that consumes me emerges the rose of your epiphany.

I sing joyfully in the midst of day. A thin column of incense streaming upward.

Fuego azul y elevado que me insume tiempo de llanto y hora de alegría.

Cantares en sazón de letanía.

Tórtola fiel y ruiseñor implume.

The blue smoke rising swallows me, in a time of tears and an hour of happiness.

You sing in the ripening litany, a faithful turtledove and plumed nightingale.

La espesa sombra derrotada ha sido

The thick haze has been scattered

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por la llama feliz, clara memoria de tu beso, en mi pecho estremecido.

by the happy blaze, the clear memory of your kiss, spreading through my breast.

Sólo leal a la tenaz historia de tu amor y mi amor, lirio encendido como una ascua de miel sobre la escoria.

Loyal only to the firm-gripped history of your love and mine, a glowing lily like an ember of honey in the ashes.

This is another poem of mourning. It succeeds through its calm and inventive reverie, moving as if magically to crystallize the closing image. An “epiphany” in Greek is a sudden and striking realization. As James Joyce noted, much of literature is epiphany, his short stories structured on suddenly uncovering a hidden truth.

[Pic] But the term has also a deep Christian significance as revelation, linking her loyalty to religious devotion.

[Ibarbourou continued to write poetry late into her life. Her last Volume, Her fierce commitment to her dead lover envelops and consumes her, like the rising incense at the altar. His voice accompanies the service, like the song of turtledove and nightingale. The idea of burning and passion and all-consuming devotion continues conventionally until the shock of the close, an epiphany, the “ascua de miel sobre la scoria” that transfigures the thought into a rapturous image.

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“Resurrección “continues this display of inventiveness and stunning surprise

RESURRECCIÓN

Resurrection

He de tener mis sauces, mis mastines, mis rosas y jacintos, como antes, han de volver mis duendes caminantes y mi marina flota de delfines.

I will have my tastes, my mastiffs, my roses and hyacinths, as before, my walking ghosts will return and my boat drawn by dolphins.

Retornarán los claros serafines, mis circos con enanos y elefantes, mis mañanas de Abril, alucinantes, en mi caballo de alisadas crines.

The pure seraphim will return, my circus with its dwarfs and elephants my April mornings, and my hallucinations, upon my horse with his smooth mane.

He de beber la vida hasta en la piedra y en el menguado zumo de la hiedra y en la sal de la lágrima furtiva,

I will drink life down to bedrock, even the stingy juice of the clinging ivy and the salt of a furtive tear,

porque regreso de la muerte y tengo, el terror del vacío de que vengo y la embriaguez hambrienta de estar viva.

because returning from the dead I will know the terror of emptiness, when I come again to the starved drunkenness of being alive.

Life’s carnival collides with oblivion, her daily joys – walking her grand dogs through the garden – with phantasms and boats “flota de delfines.” Some of the fantasy has been lost to her, those “claros serafines”, but she will beckon them with poetic figures of circus extravagance, her “alucinantes” of being the bare-back [Pic] rider, sure in her motions. This world offers variety and delights but also incomplete satisfaction, “the stingy [In 1929 she took to that flapper look, juice of the clinging ivy” and private mourning. Having taken the journey to the world of the dead, and its but she never took to the wild life that “terror of emptiness”, she embraces this hodge-podge world. It will be enough “when I come again/ to the went with it.] starved drunkenness of being alive.” That last line captures a “Carpe Deum” thought in novel images.

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“VÍSPERA DE VIAJE” forges bravely outward into the world: VÍSPERA DE VIAJE

Evening before the journey

He de hallar la pajiza flor del alba, el mielado fulgor de la mañana que todo embrujo de la noche salva, para empezar mi vida americana.

I will find the straw-colored flower of dawn, the honey-glow of morning, a morn bewitched by night’s greeting, to begin my American life.

Esa de Nueva York ancha y absurda para nosotros, los latinos puros, que Dios construye con su mano zurda, sin contención, sin diques y sin muros.

Here in New York, huge and absurd for us, the pure Latins, those who God constructed off-handedly, with no boundaries, no dams or walls.

Mi tiesa piel criolla y española echaré sobre el hombro de una ola al bajar en su puerto desmedido.

I will fling my tough skin, Creole and Spanish, over my shoulder into the waves to settle in this boundless port.

He de vivir la vida neoyorquina, sin mi severa falda de latina, pero el rosario al puño, suspendido.

I’ll live the life of a New York girl, without the severe skirt of a Latina; my rosary dangling from my fist.

Ibarbourou’s life brought her fame but also isolation. Here she contemplates emerging anew to begin her “vida americana.” It helps to recall that she was renamed “Juana de America”. Now she is off to New York, the metropolis of the New World, Uruguay never more than a hint of “America”. New York is boundless variety, ridiculous really, and, therefore, just right for Latins, a people God created “con su mano zurda”, great-hearted and absurd. She off-loads her aboriginal sensuality and Spanish reserve, to settle in this “boundless port.” The concluding stanza tells the tale, to be a “Neoyorquina”, a “New York girl”, she will have to ditch “the severe skirt of the Latina”, bound by harsh restrictions as a woman, and come at life anew, as a spiritual girl, holding her ~~~ rosary, not in quiet devotion, but in her fist.

Juana de Ibarbourou is an accomplished poet. She is no bohemian or revolutionary, and silent on feminist themes. Her poetry is personal, rarely engaging the world. Her imagery leans heavily on nature, usually with classical decorum, then rerouted into something SheSpring confines Thesurprising.

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and strict metrics, but manages them artfully, employing her words with memorable effect within her musical format. She wrote delightful poems of youth and wise poems of maturity. Her work has faded from view, but it is worth recovering despite our prejudice for the shockingly new and obscurely woven. Uruguay is a temperate land, with fresh breezes, and these days well-mannered, middle-class, peaceful and confident; the sort of place well represented by its beloved Juana.

[Pic] [Montevideo is Uruguay’s big city, with brilliant beaches and busy ports. The city attracted much of its population from Spain and Italy during the 20th C.]

Bibliography: Arbeleche, Jorge. Juana de Ibarbourou. Montevideo, Arca, 1978.

Ibarbourou, Juana de. Las lenguas de diamante/ Raíz salvaje. Ed. Jorge Rodríguez Padrón. Catedra, Letras Hispánicas. Madrid, 2011. Includes a 100-page introductory essay by the editor on the poet’s style and method. _________________. Obras Completas. Aguilar, Madrid, 1968. _________________. The most complete online collection of her poetry, and recorded readings in Spanish, are available at: http://www.poesi.as/Juana_de_Ibarbourou.htm Translation:

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The Linnet's Wings Spring 2016 Very little of Ibarbourou’s poetry exists in English. These original translations attempt to reproduce her unadorned style. No effort was made to capture her musical qualities, her rhymes and meters, in English, a

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Spring Poetry

Old Live Oak Tree and Bluebonnets on the West Texas Military Grounds, San Antonio, by Robert Julian Onderdonk

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On “Becoming a Tree” by James Graham an editorial by Oonah V Joslin

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“We try to read a wisdom never meant for us:” James Graham; The Book of Lascaux

It has been my privilege over the past eight years to publish several poems by Ayrshire poet James Graham in Every Day Poets and most recently in The Linnet's Wings. It has also been my great good fortune to have had the benefit of his advice on my own work. James has been the Poetry Group expert and mentor in www.Writewords.org.uk for twelve years and has encouraged the poetic endeavours of countless people with his generous and detailed comments.

I am delighted that some of these poems have found their way into his latest collection Becoming a Tree (Matador 16th February 2016) a title inspired by Walt Whitman.

There was a child went forth every day: And the first object he looked upon, that object he became…

I think James may well be a time lord or a shape­shifter. He certainly a word wizard, and if anyone can teach us what it's like to become a tree it is this man.

The range, depth and precision of James' poetry is fascinating. James seeks out humanity in all its guises with imagination and with empathy. One of my favourite poems is called: History of the Great War. It is a very apt, ironic title. The poem consists of only four lines yet it is a poem that encapsulates what matters most.

Stretcher-bearers found two dead one grey one khaki hand in hand First published by Postcard Poems and Prose

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'Two dead'. It is as if these were the only fatalities of that war. Or maybe a mere 'two dead' – hardly significant, two among so many others. Priority goes to the living.

'One grey one khaki'. It comes down to individuals here. Grey and khaki – ghastly as death; these colours side by side somehow make the scene more macabre. The two are on opposite sides of the conflict yet not even a comma separates them here. They are at once united and forever separated by death.

'Hand in hand'. Had they met in some hostelry before or after that war they might have greeted each other thus. That simple human connection brings us closer to the pity and fear than anything else could. It is something we all understand – the childlike need for comfort. We reach out to them as they reach out to each other in the moment that makes their connection and ours eternal.

What other history of WW1 do we need?

It is my experience of his work that when James uses a word it is chosen but natural.

When he places a word it is weighted but with a light touch. That level of crafting and universality of meaning makes James' poetry irresistible. He expresses life at the grand and minute scale; at its most serious and most ridiculous.

In All the living people he shares the soul and vision of the child who writes: “Let all the living people of the world be happy. She must have clothed that happy in her personal connotations: a log fire on a winter Friday afternoon, a chestnut pony. But she meant all peoples. All. And she meant before the people are all dead.

I gave her a top grade, but didn't ask how it should come about;” For how would the child know? Innocence is a thing to be preserved and nurtured. Here we have the simplicity of humanity is set against the problems we have created for ourselves. And James with the wisdom and experience of a father and gentle humour of a kind teacher (which he was for thirty years) asks: “happy: is it the last

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Helen Beatrix PotterThe Mice Stitching Button­Holes, Beatrix Potter

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of our three wishes to which the fairy sadly shakes her head?”

Our conflicts are real. Our castles alas are no fairy tale.

All the Living People first published by 'Every Day Poets.'

In Isle, which was also published in 'Every Day Poets,' James takes an ordinary suburban roundabout and turns it into a place: “for a thousand elves, minutely stitching tiny shoes and britches” when our suburban world with its falsified street names like “Beech Grove and Willow Avenue” no longer holds sway. It's a delightful poem! And I find myself hoping that I can become a tree too: “when the woods are dark and deep.”

In the Summer 2015 Issue of 'The Linnet's Wings' we published The Book of Lascaux, another of my favourite James Graham poems. I admire it partly because we share a love of history and archaeology, but also because it acknowledges our tentative grasp on how people used to view their world; that their world is not our world. And it assumes nothing.

“When we speak of them, we have to say perhaps, or probably, or almost certainly.

But almost, almost certainly they understood what we have called

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Onnah V Joslin

acoustics. Painted their vibrant stags and bison where the sound was good.

And the drums would beat, and the pulse of the mountain would respond.”

We can recognise this scene. We can appreciate the visual and the rhythmic but we lack a common language and thereby a common understanding. It is not that they are primitive or we more advanced. There are simply limitations: “We try to read a wisdom never meant for us:” The thing is we can never know who or what it was meant for – the animals, the caves; the living or the dead; gods? Or what the message is. We use science. We use poetry. We “unearth their shards, and dust them off, and guess; decode and annotate their wordless images, read them as metaphor. We hear but cannot share” James Graham takes us to the Lascaux Caves and to other places, other times, and there we encounter people just as removed from us as those two dead soldiers were from each other and yet just as close; as removed as the child's reality is from that of the adult; as removed as we are from the elves of that traffic roundabout. But he takes us there for a purpose; so that we may try to read their wisdom and discover our own joy and that is a thing worth doing.

The title poem ends: “I knew nothing then but the sun and the breeze searching my limb and the cool water rising through my sapwood.”

Becoming a Tree

I highly recommend it.

You can buy it HERE www.troubador.co.uk/matador.asp

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Peter Pan is the fairies' orchestra, Arthur Rackham

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Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick

Crescendo In the gap, in the mind, there's a rest.

I imagine that it's scripted to score.

That a symbol is placed to halt quest.

To halt thought for a minute—or more.

And one lifts their hands off the keys.

And waits for silence—to fall.

And in the hush the muse feels at ease.

It's present in this space—and enthralls.

Like sun's kiss on soft, silky, breeze.

Or rumble in early, spring, storm.

It's like God is moving to please.

And he's conducting his tunes to inform.

And in that space all-time makes peace.

And one senses this feeling—so warm.

It's still there when composition is released.

And it stays to warm the bright, winter, morn.

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Winter in Abramtsevo by Valentin Serov

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Bill West

Continental Drift Someone left the gate open.

Maybe they were cold Wind driven, blinded by snow keen to get home to hearth and home and a warm.

The gate was open wind blown. Snow piled against hedges but at the gap of the gate it drifted, filling ditches snow escaped to the road.

Someone left the gate open.

Continental drift into the road, piece by piece building like a question who can say what may happen?

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The Path intersects the Garden, Grant Wood

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Bill Frank Robinson

Eve A story of grit and good cheer Boiling up out of Texas on the run running from a death sentence imposed on her and Joyce Joyce, her sweet baby born only two years ago On the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada she comes to rest weary, scared she enters a small café in a small, remote desert town She sits on a stool, at the counter Joyce sleeping in her lap trembling, she offers the few coins in her hand for a cup of coffee The counterman waves aside the coins and places a cup of coffee on the counter before her He stands back, arms folded waiting for a teary eyed tale of woe told in a weepy, staggering voice She looks him full in the face and smiles broadly, “Thank you kind sir. I have come a long way but I won’t burden you with my misfortunes. It is work I seek. Can you help?”

The giant counterman unfolds his arms, “Hells Bells, woman!

Anybody with your grit can work for me anytime.”

“I got a empty cabin out back and children to help with the young’n.

Whadda you say?”

Along the 395 corridor the word spread: there is a waitress in a small café, a waitress who never forgets and truly believes each customer is a special person to be remembered and cherished.

The tiny café grows and gains a legendary footing among travelers along Highway 395 Eve blossoms as Joyce rewards her with grandchildren her black past remains rooted in the Texas woods

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Above us the great grave sky by Arthur Streeton

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Carla Martin-Wood

In which I am An Cailleach Bhéara* I don’t know when winter became my home, nor when the sun first failed to renew, when the owl cast its shadow across my heart, and the first blossom withered in my hand, the first child looked away, and the first crow called my name; nor when skin, once firm as a grape, grew raisined, and veins once hidden began to mark my hands like tributaries, that guide the ancient power of what I am become outward to the Great Grey Invisible that weaves what is and will be.

I don’t know when my words first shaped air into flesh, when stars first bloomed from my fingers, and I first bent light into being, when maiden became most ancient crone, and fell to the grief of wisdom.

Some nights, there is no sleep; such times my eyes pierce the icy curtain that hangs beyond, and it opens momentarily, reveals a restless panorama: visceral dreams recount a maidentime, when I was new and fair, each random, rambling love of my libertine life.

They float unreachable now, trapped in the awful and fluorescent light of memory – this unwanted perusal of what could not be and never really was – each hope that unfeathered fell to lie piteous on the damp and funereal earth.

It went so quickly, lost in a kaleidoscope of years.

And in lieu of lovers, I took on power,

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wove the world on a charm, sprung fresh from the root of sorrow.

I don’t know when I grew so old, how old I really am.

Go into my attic, Father Pádraig – count the bones you find sequestered there.

Let them tell my age – read scribed upon them a litany of sins.

Mete me no penance, Father: I confess only to myself, and my tears fall stones enough to build a cairn.

Then get me to the river before sunrise, before the first lark sings, and while the hound lies sleeping.

Let me renew; let me once more recall the way my body felt with morning in it.

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Author Notes *The Cailleach Bhéara is a Goddess of Creation, some say of winter, death, and even a resurrection Goddess. She is most ancient of beings. Stories about her are diverse.

My personal favorite says that when she grows very old, if she can make it to the river at dawn, and before she hears a dog bark or a bird sing, she will be made young again. There is a story of a priest – some say St. Patrick – who found her and demanded to know her age. She told him to go to the attic and count the bones he found there, remnants of things she’d eaten over millennia. When he returned from the attic, he found her changed, a young woman in her place. As I grow older, I find there is in all elder women a young woman, still. My reflection always surprises me.

And in that sense, I think we all become An Cailleach Bhéara.

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And then, the lover sighing like a furnace, with a woeful ballad made to his mistress's eyebrow- Louis Wain

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Oonah V Joslin

The Dogged Determination of Cats Up among the chimney pots a mixed choir of local cats above the sooty branches of the tree greets darkness with a one, two, three.

New loves and lost loves; loves grown cold human love, puppy love, love of gold.

Notesters note and the lyricist writes of smokes and fumes, delights and frights.

They eulogise each star they see lament a time when the sky was free when their fur was clean and the air smelt nice and they sang in fields of corn and mice.

And they yammer and yowl all through the night piano, crescendo, black notes, white; fortissimo, caterwaul to a grey-scale until dawn makes their voices pale.

They cannot turn the tiles to turf but still they sing for all they're worth and they'll sing again, promulgate their truth tomorrow night up on the roof.

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Woman and Child against a Stained Glass Background, Odilon Redon

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Irena Pasvinter

Tiny Fingers She used to be a lovely doll, A fine doll indeed.

In tiny fingers she would stroll, And play, and laugh, and feed.

She hoped the tiny fingers would come And maybe pick her up, But broken glasses called her dumb And told her to grow up.

What happened next she didn't know, But fingers clutched her hard: In stifling heat, in dreary cold, They pressed her to the heart.

They were wrong. She was picked up, Though by another hand.

Her blouse and skirt were tidied up, But head they didn't mend.

One day she felt a foreign hand -It grabbed her and it hurt.

And tiny fingers, they unbent.

She flew into the dirt.

She found herself behind a glass, With crowds shuffling past.

She didn't like this quiet fuss And hoped it wouldn't last.

She worried for her dainty suit, Her curly hair, so neat, When, trampled by a heavy boot, Her lovely head had split.

But when she asked a baby boot, "What is this strange place?"

"Museum. Auschwitz," it boomed And curled its rotten lace.

And there she lay, in trash and gore, Amidst this earthly hell, And what she heard and what she saw It's better not to tell.

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Landscape Study, Theodore Rousseau

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Terry Jude Miller

Feedback the world rolls into the perfect acoustical position as I stop to rest at this hilltop in the woods nature filters out the highway, one mile south nothing gets in the way of north baring her deep blue bosom, daring me to suckle I prop against a pine tree's alligator skin, close my eyes and let spring enter me with its unharnessed softness, the perfume of its sex, the hum of her organism I am no longer a man with the tethers of invented life curved into me with hooks of want I am something that belongs here, part of its breathing, it waits to hear me exhale

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April and my Plastic Sunflowers

Head of a Woman in Front of Sunflowers by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Sonnet Mondal

The four plastic sunflowers in my bedroomThe way they swayed in the ceiling fan’s air Were the functional-year-long-April for me.

Fallen twigs of meditating winter And the deadwood sanity of their roughness; The begging deserts of the patient summer And the coarseness of their ravaged mirages; The thin tune of the nostalgic autumn And the restlessness of their alcoholic breezesWere never like fresh seasonal fruits to me For I had the functional-year-long-April in my bedroom: Those four plastic sunflowers.

Not long, my wedding and divorceBoth in their infancy Ended the perpetual April in my room By demanding those yellow sunflowers In the package of reparation.

It was four seasons ago and the spring of April Now seems to be a creepy plastic serpent Irresistibly insidious in its illusory cruelty as my new girl friend from the same city Talked of bringing new plastic flowers in my room.

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Sergio Ortiz

saving me from despair— a cloud walker camouflaged with rainbows geography of my memory— a collection of verses hijacked from the dead of night I walk on a wet street auditioning for a new tomorrow... the world is still at war

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Catherine Power Evans

Fumus Autumnus

Crows Fly by Red Sky at Sunset by Shibata Zeshin

Snaffling leftover hazelnuts, Sleek squirrel suspends upside-down.

Tiny hands deftly unwrap dinner.

Galvanise-grey, this acrobatic rat flies Onto the shed. It darts nervous glances through Quick, obsidian beads.

A scattering of ransacked shells Dapples lawn between hewn and Hollowed windfalls.

The magic wand of Hallowe’en twilight Conjures up flames.

Husks oblige and crackle their contempt, Spitting on the bonfire, releasing A contrary mist that stings Moon-cold eyes.

Hard, inert ground smoulders under Toxic low cloud.

Around the gilded, bright pyre, A different kind of smoke emanates From mouths of human dragons.

No one notices the rise of maverick Sparks to kindle ether ancestors In the atmosphere.

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Jane Burn

Poe-ish I cannot see more than a hundred yards ahead.

The mist is wet – the wipers persist with its settling, flicker-flack, flicker-flack, flicker flack.

Trees blunder from the scud, scratch-handed portents, all deadwood.

A branched crow beads its eye at me. How the bends in the road come out quick, ghosts in the vapour shapes.

Ghosts and you, you, you.

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Crone's Counsel Go deep into the wild where no one has bruised the earth where nothing is opaque and everything you need to know lies sleeping just below the surface leave the hounds that trouble you to bay outside in futility where we are going they cannot follow bring what hurts you here find a stump or stone sit and be patient soon your eyes will adjust and you will see how in this darkness of wood and fern dogwood petals float effortless and pale impossible as phantoms as though they are attached to nothing of this earth for them there is no gravity

Stream in Forest, Winter by Thomas Hill

see those tiny mushrooms gathered in a fairy ring and know they have waited all this time tender and fragile they have survived for this moment for you alone to see them notice these tiny forget-me-nots how even they are important how they thrive blue and strong and outnumber giant trees that rise above them

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Carla Martin-Wood

now listen the birds know you have come and sing your welcome thank them the wind whispers your name in a new language learn it let fear drop away and hesitation evaporate more swift than morning dew make a truce with yourself breathe let everything bloom that was seeded inside you long ago and when you leave this place you will find the hounds have gone

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Among the lillies by Paul Gauguin

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Dolores Duggan

Death Leaving.

Underneath the granite slab and the hard, cracked, earth we placed you hand in hand with death. Lovers under the sod of time and there was silence but for the eerie wailing sound of the seagulls scavenging round the docks beyond the wall.

I felt for a moment I could hear your voice, calling me, hairs rising on my arms.

The dull thud of clay on coffin lid brought me back to tears and the sharp lash of the wind.

We stood there, a tight knit group holding each other and keening silently inside our souls.

In autumns silky light prayers are said. Flowers spread in a pattern only you would know and like. The colours vibrant; the scent of lilies and of death.

Under the ivy-clad ancient walls of Forthill lie the many, dates and names faded now.

You amongst them, a new companion, a friend, a visitor whose life force spreads out Throughout the burial ground.

Shoulders hunched a brief glance back as I leave you to the elements.

The seagulls cry in the distance.

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February First Renewed endeavour man sows Birds sculpt sun beams growth MLF, 2008

Edge of the Forest (Spruce forest), Ivan Shishkin

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Beate Sigriddaughter

Fountain I wish I were a fountain with birds fluttering onto the stone rim for a summer drink. Yes. And perhaps I am.

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This is Magic this rabbit-stare channel to vastness and warmth and just rabbit, just me; this red flood in my chest sweeping all of us into great arms, yet just sea; this hollowness, falling at night saying Roisin needs comforting now; this robin who cocks my mum’s eye come away come away bonny lass - don’t know how!

Westering Eriskay Vatersay Luskintyre Scalpay Tolsta Scarp Callanish Huisinish Uig Carishader Staffa Scarista stark.

Eyes bleached pale blue by fair sand harebells sea lungs breathed transparent by larks.

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Fianna (Fiona Russell Dodwell)

Lacewing A slight green shiver – on white sheets a lacewing warms in spring morning breath. ...........

In spring morning light all you see of lacewing fart is small green shiver

Linnansaari

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Cuckoo! He's back, Honore Daumier

The sudden cuckoo turns every leaf and every layer of guts and skin and whitened air into a shining ear.

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Jane Burn

Lazarus Jewel Box

Sea Idyll, Joaquín Sorolla

Rolled by waves from its moor in silt, the tide’s drag unveils a mouthful emptied of muscle.

Tampered by crabs, cracked by gulls, their heads sundered on cobble, the morsel of gold weighed in with throat slicking relish. Open caskets on shorelines wait for beachcombers to claim them - domes of brittle frill. Gifts from the Queen of the sea.

Your treasure becomes a nucleus of silence, tinted with whispered sounds of the sea. Risen from the dead to a bathroom shelf - nuzzled on occasion against a human ear, desiring to remember its gathering day.

The hiss and boom, the bubbled swoosh cut into the grooves – the trickle through fingers decanting palm measured weirs of sand.

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Margot Brown

Hardings Beach It is a year today. Passive waves roll.

I assess the toll; my feet sink into Hardings Beach, where parking lot and surf meet at high tide join and separate spatting lovers at their ebb.

It was our last picnic; a whole wheat blanket for smoked ham and cheddar cheese a film of yellow mustard, your slice of onion so thin I skinned my thumb on the cutting board.

We sipped Snapple strawberry tea from flexible straws — necks, threaded and bent making bubbling, sucking sounds like intubation.

Should I have said what I anticipated when gulls landed and thrashed, beaks scavenged beyond the flaps of the trash can lids?

Let you taste the salt of my nascent poem?

I took pictures on my smart phone then drove home.

We never knew what to say to each other.

But we always knew when to say nothing at all.

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Classic Wings, William Shakespeare

A Fairy Song Over hill, over dale, Thorough bush, thorough brier, Over park, over pale, Thorough flood, thorough fire!

I do wander everywhere, Swifter than the moon's sphere; And I serve the Fairy Queen, To dew her orbs upon the green; The cowslips tall her pensioners be; In their gold coats spots you see; Those be rubies, fairy favours; In those freckles live their savours; I must go seek some dewdrops here, And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear.

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James G. Piatt

On the Seashore I listen to the Strident roar of the ocean Sitting on the heat Of the yellow sand Waiting for holy peals of the Rushing waves of brine My memories flow Into my nomadic soul Searching for my youth But my fading mind Fails to remember the past When the seashore sang.

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POEM Too earnest, he said, and wilfully obscure. It's no more than chopped prose. This could be just what we're looking for.

It was sort of an experiment, I said.

I simply wrote the first thing that came into my head. I tried not to rhyme.

It's perfect, he said, it's got the lot, nonce words, archaisms, a learnèd polyglot.

Gratuitous macaronics and puns abound.

It'll win an award or I'm Ezra Pound.

I did my best, I said. I I tried to delete from my memory all I knew about scansion, metre and poetic feet.

Feet? he said. This poem's got legs, it could run and run. There's just one thing though. The look of it.

Square blocks of text. Too neat.

Couldn't you jazz it up a bit?

Make it more sort of Beat?

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Portrait of a man of noble birth with a book, Katsushika Hokusai--PS MLF, 2016

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Robert Grossmith

You mean like this? I said And took from my briefcase another version full of random empty space That's it! he said. Now it's done.

All it needs is a title. Have you got one?

I have, I said. I'm calling it Poem.

If readers don't know what it is they're reading, well, that'll show 'em.

I'm moved, he said, tears springing to his eyes.

So simple, so apt. Deserves the Nobel fuckin Prize.

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Four Sketches of a Foot, Vincent van Gogh

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Robert Grossmith

Sandie and Dud Sandie Shaw and Dudley Moore came from my hometown.

Not much of a claim to fame, I agree, especially as our paths never crossed, though my dad knew Dudley Moore's mum, but that's another story.

Sandie Shaw sang shoeless, which sounds like one of those tongue-twisters.

I suppose the look came from the name, like she was paddling at the ocean's edge.

And Cuddly Dudley, he had a club foot, though it didn't stop him from playing the fool from Oxford to Hollywood, on stage and onscreen, including on a beach with Bo Derek in 10.

There were no beaches in Dagenham, just endless factories and sprawling housing estates, homes for the hands at Ford's and elsewhere, like the ones where Sandie and Dud grew up and fled, fleet-footed, as fast as they could.

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The Opal Miner On the horizon of every dream a play of colour glimmers soil heaving like a new birth.

This is a land navigated by the stars word of mouth and tattered maps.

In her eighth decade feeling first frost like never before some say she should leave this rough country.

Letting the white opal lie undisturbed in its thin crevice.

But she cannot forsake these behemoths and mounds needing more than ever some kind of presence.

Not a god or white feathers just the bones of him shoulder to shoulder in the ground.

Poet's Dream - Odilon Redon

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Clare McCotter

Her dream was a long one scraping back layer after layer of Bragan Bog till she found a vein of adularescence.

Pale as her dove become bone only the bones of a dog.

In the end the years carried her away keeping covered up what may shudder hearts far off in time.

Having a method or way with them to feel the fear of the youngest disappeared.

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In Bellaghy Graveyard Standing at the eastern gate of heaven Ancient Egypt’s holy sycamore was the threshold between life and death.

Planted beside the grand and ordinary tombs they believed its transporting bark ferried their dead faster from the dark.

Sycamore breath gauzing your grave in news reports brought home thoughts of flesh and blood so changed and changing with time’s tread: stormy sementine dawns lifting them up from a basket of roots to the luminous beyond.

Some nineteen months since your death visiting for the first time awkwardness stops my tongue forming your name noting instead black glar behind the hedge the broken headstones left nearby their tiny narratives gone with the weather.

A lengthening lull in talk seems set to last.

Then the rich warm tones of a wren whirring closer than ever before breaks the silence.

Troglodytes troglodytes leaving the lark

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Plate 136 Meadow Lark - John James Audubon

Clare McCotter

to dig the depths of blue delves deep an old marker’s mossy crevice Sounding clear complex notes at day’s done the winter wren will not rise on a tree’s frosted breath.

His sky is stone starry with gold and umber its moon the colour of shadows.

The cave dweller’s song echoing hope through fracture and fissure.

A forager in the dreaming efflorescent dark.

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The Linnet´s Wings

Archie's Heart­Breaking Discoveries by

Bill Frank Robinson

The Circus by Jules Pascin

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Chapter IX rchie is sick; ever since he got knocked out nothing seems right no more. Everything is strange he sees things moving away from him and then they come back real close. It’s mostly the walls in the room but now it’s the trees and the houses, hedges, sky, and everything else. He just can’t get things to stop moving away and then back when he looks at them. And he wants to throw up from time to time and his tongue is sore and swollen.

He must of bit his tongue when he went down cause it’s been bleeding and it hurts too much to eat. He’s walking to school but he don’t want to go: he might throw up in the classroom. He’s known as a tough guy now but he don’t feel like no tough guy.

And Pike-eye Monahan? Everybody’s mad at him because he lost on a foul to a little kid. Everybody hates a dirty fighter especially if he’s supposed to win. They say his pa’s so mad he shipped the disgraced bad guy out of town—maybe all the way back to Ireland. Even Pike-eye’s friends are getting shunned, ain’t nobody wants to talk to them no more. Somebody said Archie was always gonna be known as the guy who run Pikeeye outta town.

Archie walks right up to a boy sitting on a low brick fence. The boy is crying; books are scattered on the sidewalk around him. It’s Benny, the only rich kid in Washington School. Cab says rich folks ain’t no good because they’re inbred. Archie don’t know what inbred means but he feels sorry for Benny. Seems like everybody picks on Benny. The teachers are mean to him, and he’s got mean parents; they don’t allow Benny to bring any friends over to their house.

“What happened, Benny?” Archie bends down and gathers the books into his arms.

Benny looks at Archie and cries harder. “Paulie says if he sees me again he’s going to beat me to a pulp.

He grabbed my books and threw them on the ground. He hates me.”

“Paulie hates ever’body. Come on, let’s go to school.”

“I don’t want to go to school.”

“No kiddin’? Then let’s go play hooky.”

Benny jumps to his feet. “I can’t. I don’t want to get in trouble.”

“You ain’t gonna get in no trouble. Nobody’s gonna catch us. We can go over to the other side of the river .”

Benny’s mouth drops open and he looks at Archie like he’s crazy. “The other side of the river? No kids from around here ever go over there. How are you going to get over there anyway?”

“We can go across the Highway 99 Bridge. We’ll have a lot of fun over there.”

Benny grabs his books. “My mom told me never to get on that bridge. It’s too dangerous. She said she’s going to give me a whipping if I do.”

Archie knows that's a lie; Benny ain't never had a whipping in his life. And that is a mystery to all the kids that know Benny: if he never gets a whipping why is he so scared? What punishment can be so awful?

Benny pulls out a hanky; he’s the only kid in town that’s got a hanky. Archie is reminded of a joke.

“Hey, Benny, what does the rich man put in his pocket and the poor man throw away?”

“I don’t know. What?” Benny blows his nose.

“Snot!” Archie is laughing but Benny keeps looking sad. He’s a strange guy but he would be a regular guy if it weren’t for his folks.

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Archie puts his arm around Benny and guides him across the golf course to a spot high above the Tuolumne River. There’s lots of brush and trees all along the bank and the water’s slowly running all the way to the ocean. Benny says, “Let’s stay on this side. I don’t want to cross over the river.”

Archie thinks that maybe Benny’s right. “OK! Let’s throw rocks.” And he blasts one hard and fast, skimming the bushes and crashing into the river.

“GOD DAMN, KIDS! You almost hit me! I’m gonna whale the tar out of ya!” A big old nastylooking guy jumps out of the bushes and comes running up the hill.

“Don’t worry, Benny, we left him in the dust.” Archie stops running and looks back to see the angry man is no longer in sight.

Benny’s riled. “You shouldn’t have thrown that rock.”

“It’s your fault, Benny. This wouldn’t have happened if we was across the river like I said.”

“OK. OK. Let’s go across the river. If I get in trouble it’s going to be your fault.”

The cars are racing along the road as the boys follow 99 Highway to the bridge. Seems like all the cars in town are trying to get across the river at the same time. The engine noise, gas fumes, and crazy drivers block out all other sounds, sights, and smells. The bridge sidewalk is narrow and close to the speeding cars.

The concrete lions guarding the bridge approach have their faces chipped and worn smooth.

On the other side of the river the boys run hard to get away from the highway, but a new noise hits them head-on. The noise is a mighty roar that blots out everything. They are made deaf and dumb by the thunder that takes over the whole area. Bushes and trees block the path to the river. The travelers walk away from the river until they see a clearing. Once across the clearing they look from the high bank down into the moving water.

A giant iron scoop on a cable is flying down and splashing into the water. It comes back up and dumps a load of sand on the riverbank. There’s a high tower up near the giant motor that sits away from the river at the end of the cable. The guy who runs the thing must be in there with all his levers. He can’t be seen because of the glare even though the tower has windows all around. There’s a mound of sand going out into the stream directly beneath the cable. The mound goes almost to where the scoop crashes into the water. Poles set in this sand bank hold up the cable. Archie has heard about these things—it’s a dredge. He tries to tell Benny but the words are snatched from his mouth and blown away.

Benny’s mouth is open and he’s staring at this unbelievable contraption. Archie thinks: “I gotta watch him: he gets crazy sometimes.” The dredge keeps grabbing sand, taking it up the hill and dumping it, moving back and forth. The noise never stops.

Archie is distracted and when he looks back Bennie is running. He’s running pell-mell down the hill.

He runs under the tower and out under the cable. Archie goes after him, as he, Benny, runs all the way to the end of this dam-like formation. Something causes Archie to stop and look back. He sees the speeding scoop coming straight toward him. Just before it hits him it levels off, passes over his head, and crashes in the river. The excitement and danger thrill Archie: he likes it.

Archie keeps chasing Benny, stopping to watch the scary scoop each time it passes over his head. He gets close to Benny who turns and looks at Archie with his eyes getting wider and wider. What’s wrong?

What’s he getting upset about?

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Archie feels a stinging whack across his rear end. He turns around and there’s a big man with a tree limb in his hand. He points the stick towards the riverbank. Archie runs back under the tower, stops, and looks back.

Benny’s backed all the way to the end of the mound. The man is walking fast right at him. Benny turns and jumps in the river. The current grabs him and sweeps him away. He can’t swim!

Archie is running along the riverbank, trying to keep his friend in sight. Benny’s fighting hard, splashing the water with all his might. Archie breaks a branch off a tree and runs ahead. He wades out into the current and reaches with the limb but he can’t reach him. Benny’s a goner.

There’s a man sitting on a tree stump smoking a cigarette and looking out across the river. Archie runs up and grabs him, pointing at Benny. The man jumps up, takes his shoes and pants off and dives in the river. He swims to Benny. Benny grabs him and pushes him under the water. The guy comes up fighting mad. He punches Benny full in the face. Benny goes under and the guy hauls him out by the back of his collar. He drags him to shore and throws him onto the bank. The guy's really mad.

Benny’s shaking, crying, coughing all at the same time. His clothes are stinky and slimy. He looks awful. Nobody can hear anything but the man waves the boys away from the river.

Archie gets Benny up and they walk towards home. It’s a long walk but Archie feels good about getting away from the noise. Benny ain’t doing any talking. He just keeps on shaking and crying. Near where this adventure started they stop to allow Archie to retrieve Benny’s books from their hiding spot in the bushes.

Benny’s got a big new pretty house. The best house Archie has ever seen. He rings the doorbell and Benny’s mom answers the door. “Benny! Where have you been? What happened to your clothes? Why weren’t you in school? Your father and I have been looking all over for you."

Benny’s shivering and shaking; his lips are quivering as he tries to say something.

“Shut up! I don’t want to hear your lies! Get in this house right now!” She grabs him and throws him in the house. Archie starts to leave but she turns and says, “Stay right there. I want you to see what happens to Benny when he’s bad.”

Benny’s looking around his mom, pleading with his eyes for his friend to leave. But Archie’s gotta see what’s gonna happen. If it’s not the cat-o’-nine-tails, what could it be?

Archie hears the commotion in the house. Benny’s pleading and his dad is hollering. Archie can’t make out the words but something bad is happening. The door flies open and Dad comes out. He has an awful look on his face and his hair’s all messed up. He reaches back and starts pulling Benny out of the house. Benny’s fighting and screaming, grabbing the doorjamb, doing everything he can to stay inside.

Now he’s on the porch, fighting, kicking, and screaming. His dad says, "Benny, get on outside and play with your friend."

Benny ain't going nowhere. He grabs the porch pole, sinks to the ground, and looks at Archie through tears and screams. He's asking Archie with his eyes not to tell anybody that his dad is making him wear a girl's dress.

Archie walks away. Poor Benny the worst thing that can happen to a boy has happened to him.

Archie vows never to tell anybody.

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The Linnet´s Wings

Chapter X Archie is sitting on the couch in Grandma’s arms.

“How ya feelin’, Archie?”

“I feel okay. When me and Benny was foolin’ around under the dredge I forgot all about being sick and feeling funny and all.

“Ha! Ha! Sumtimes that’s the best medicine just get on with your life and forget all your troubles. I remember when me and Tom first got married …”

“Grandma, you never did tell me much about you gettin’ married and all that stuff. The last I remember you got kicked out of your house by the woman you worked for.”

“Oh yeah. That was a kick in the pants all right. I was young and always had a roof over my head and all of a sudden I was out on the street. Lucky Tom was with me cause he knowed right away what to do. He said I could sleep in the fat lady’s tent and work in the kitchen. We went back to the circus that night and left Topeka the next day. The whole circus pulled up stakes and hit the road in a caravan. We didn’t stop movin’ till we hit Emporia. Our little circus always played in the little towns. I never figgered why they was in Topeka when I joined. Maybe it was providence.”

“What’s providence?”

“Damned if I know. It just seemed like sumthin’ smart to say. And quit your God- damned laughin’.

If I pop one upside your head you won’t think it’s so funny.”

“Ha! Ha! Sorry, Grandma.”

She pulls Archie’s head to her breast. “You little dickens. You know I’d never hitcha’. That punch I caught ya with was a accident. You was blockin’ and dodgin’ punches so pretty I decided to throw a five punch combination atcha’. That wouldn’t have happened if ya was throwin’ punches back. Remember that the next time you put the gloves on.”

Archie quits laughing. He’s hoping that Grandma, Lonnie, and everybody else will forget about fighting. The one thing that worries him is that everybody says that he’s gotta fight Paulie. Paulie is one guy he don’t want to mess with. “So ya married Tom, slept with the fat lady, and worked in the kitchen.”

Grandma pushes Archie away and laughs so hard she’s shaking all over and tears pour out of her eyes.

“How am I gonna tell my story with you making me laugh so hard? You’re the funniest and smartest kid I ever knowed. Where’d ya get so smart at?”

“Pa says I’m the dumbest kid he ever saw.”

Grandma sobers up. “That’s what all men tell their sons. I don’t know why they do that. It just puts an extra burden on somebody trying to find his way in the world. O! O! Here comes Lonnie an’ it looks like he’s bustin’ with news. I’ll have ta tell ya my story later.”

Archie looks out the front window and sees Lonnie hurrying up the front walk. He’s got a bigger smile than usual on his face. The front door flies open and that game leg swings stiffly across the threshold and plants its foot on the floor. The rest of Lonnie follows the leg. “Grandma, Andy’s coming home. He’ll be here next week.”

“Where’d ya hear that.”

“Babe Risko just pulled upside me in his big car and said he’s got a fight for Andy next month. He said this is a big fight and if Andy wins he will be in line for some even bigger things. That’s what he said.”

Grandma disengages from Archie and stands up. “Babe Risko? Ain’t he the fat son of a bitch that

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ruined Tommy?”

“He didn’t ruin Tommy. Tommy caused his own problems. Besides Tommy’s the one that got ever’ thing going. He told Babe about Andy.”

“Horse manure! Tommy wouldn’t have no dealings with that fat son of a bitch after all that’s happened.”

Lonnie hops back towards the kitchen swinging his bad leg like a little kid. “You go on trashin’ what’s happenin’ all you want. It’s gonna happen no matter what. And wait’ll ya find out who Andy’s gonna fight.”

Grandma races after her fast-moving son. “Longfellow Johnson! Don’t you walk away from me.

Who’s he fightin’ anyways?”

Archie hears the back door open, Lonnie laughing, and silence after the door slams shut. Grandma comes storming back into the front room with a frown on her face. “Dang that boy. He can be so frustratin’.”

Archie’s puzzled. “Who’s Tommy and why didja call him Longfellow?”

Grandma smiles and puts her arm around Archie. “Tommy’s my other son, Tom Junior. You ain’t met him. We named Lonnie after a famous man. We was hopin’ he would take to book-learnin’. But he turned out like the rest of us: none of the Johnson’s like schoolin’.”

Archie figgers he’s got Grandma talking now and he can jump into some forbidden subjects. “What happened to Lonnie’s leg and who did he murder?”

Grandma seizes Archie’s shoulders and turns him to face her. “Boy, there’s things we don’t talk about in this house. I’m gonna pretend I never heard what you said. You just keep all those things to yourself.”

Archie nods his head in agreement but he’s trying to think of a way to find out everything.

***

The next day Archie is walking across the school grounds when he crosses paths with Gary Striker.

Gary’s a stuck-up guy but Archie says hello anyway. Gary turns with a sneer on his face. “You ain’t nothing but an Okie. My dad said you should go back to Oklahoma where you belong.”

Archie’s heard this stuff before and he’s not bothered by attacks like this. “I ain’t done it. I’m from Colorado, Denver Colorado.”

“You’re still an Okie. And your friends, the Johnson’s, are Okies too. You Okie sons a bitches can’t even talk like us real Americans.”

“You don’t know nothin’. They’re from Kansas.”

“Kansas, Colorado, Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma it’s all the same. You’re all dumb Okies and don’t belong in California. Besides I know a lot more than you do.”

“You still don’t know nothin’.”

Gary can see that Archie’s not upset by his taunts so he decides to escalate his assault. “I know Lonnie’s a murderer.” He’s encouraged by Archie’s reaction. “A no-good rotten murderer.”

Tears spring into Archie’s eyes. “He didn’t murder nobody.”

“Oh yeah? He murdered Todd Toolbee.”

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Archie’s crying now. “Who’s Todd Toolbee?”

“He’s Caleb Toolbee’s son.”

“Who’s Caleb Toolbee?”

Gary’s incredulous. “You are dumb. He’s the richest man in Stanislaus County—maybe the richest guy in the whole world. He owns everything in this county. Boy, are you dumb.”

Back home, Grandma can’t get Archie to stop crying. “What’s a matter, boy? Come on it couldn’t be that bad. You can lay it on ol’ Granny here and ever’thing will be all right.”

Grandma sits beside Archie on the couch and he scoots into her arms, sobbing as he says, “Gary Striker said Lonnie murdered Todd Toolbee. He didn’t do it. Did he?”

Grandma pats Archie’s back. “Land of Goshen, some things never die. Jest calm down and I’ll tell you the whole story then I never wanna hear you talk about it again.”

Chapter XI

Grandma pulls a large steamer trunk from under her bed.

She motions to Archie to help her carry the worn container into the front room where they sit it in front of the couch. She pulls the lid up to reveal the interior stuffed with photo albums, scrap books, newspaper clippings, and a large assortment of mementos. She looks at Archie and motions with her hand towards the trunk contents.

“This is all I got in this world.” And she starts crying, her shoulders shaking.

Archie is moved to tears. He sits beside her, wraps himself in her arms, and they suffer, together, a long interlude of uncontrolled weeping. Finally, she pushes Archie away. “Enough of that. We gotta get on with the story. I’ll be back in a minute.” She walks toward the kitchen and the bathroom beyond.

Archie looks after her in amazement; how could a woman so tough become so much like a baby over some old stuff? He likes to look at old pictures and hear about people long dead and things they did but it never made him cry. Even his mother, as mean as she is, will start crying when she talks about things and people from long ago. Heck, Grandpa and Grandma weren’t even dead and she cried about them because they lived so far away and she’d never see ‘em again. He just don’t understand grown-ups.

Grandma returns and pulls a newspaper clipping from the trunk as she sits down beside Archie. “I gotta start from the beginnin’ and tell the whole story. Otherwise you’ll never understand why that Toolbee kid needed killin’.”

Grandma’s still sniffling, her flabby lips quivering, and Archie knows he’s the only person in the whole world that can understand her. Even Lonnie would be asking her to say it again. But not Archie, it’s almost like he knows what she’s going to say before she says it. She points with a shaky finger at the picture on the clipping. “That’s us. Tom, me, Tommy, and Lonnie.” She points to each figure as they appear from left to right. Archie looks at the picture and sees a tall man staring back at him. It’s the first time he’s seen Tom and he has to agree with Grandma; the guy looks like a movie star. The lady standing beside Tom is smiling but the two boys, Tommy a head taller, have mean looks on their faces.

All are wearing blue tights like acrobats in the movies. The caption beneath the photo says: “THE JOHNSONS—A CIRCUS FAMILY.” “Gosh, Grandma. You guys was famous.”

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Grandma’s face breaks into a big grin. “We had our day.”

“And you was purty. You said you was ugly.”

Grandma laughs. “I got married and that changed everthin’.”

Archie remembers that Grandma joined the circus with Tom when she was kicked out of her home. “Did you marry Tom right away?”

Grandma laughs some more. “Heavens no, child. Tom always thought I was too young ta get married. I almost had ta bust him one ta get him ta notice me.”

Archie is puzzled. “I thought you guys was in love when ya first met.”

Grandma returns the clipping to the trunk and begins sorting through other clippings. “Tom wasn’t like that. He just saw me as a young girl who needed a friend. He was never lookin’ for nothing for hisself.” Her face takes on a dreamy look as she lays her head back and stares at the ceiling. “I can tell ya the story ‘cause I got it rit down.”

Archie raises up on a knee and elbow to stare into her face. “Ya mean ya got it all written down?”

“Yup. Right ‘cher.” Her pale blue eyes sparkle as she taps her forehead with a finger. She screws her face into a wrinkled grotesque smile. Her jaws clamp together and her face ends at the tip of her nose—it’s her way of clowning.

This clowning always made Archie laugh till now. He stares long and hard at her as something cold grows deep inside his body. He almost never thinks of things beyond himself. That other people have a story to tell is something he never considers. He doesn’t reflect on the time stories were told around the campfire back in Colorado. Like all children he views others as there for him and him alone. But this mean truth has been lurking in his brain for a long time: GROWN-UPS WILL NOT LIVE LONG IF THEY DON’T HAVE ANY TEETH AND GRANDMA DON’T HAVE NO TEETH.

...

Next Grandma’s Story

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The Linnet´s Wings

Cut Loose by Digby Beaumont

t was impossible for my dad to move off the bed: Overnight he had turned into a kite. He lay motionless, a checkerboard of garish red and yellow panels, such a contrast to the sober greys of his customary three-piece business suits.

"First Mum, now this," I said. "What were you thinking?"

"Check me out," he said. "High-performance ripstop nylon sail, graphite spars and an eight-foot wingspan fully extended."

"What was wrong with your old life?" I asked.

"Reaching for a hand that's no longer there?" he said. "Sitting hollow-eyed in front of the TV night after night? Lying awake alone?"

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Image :Baloons on Beach at Fecamp , PS MLF, 2016

Digby Beaumont

"You didn't consider my feelings? You're the only family I have left."

"I'm counting on you," he said.

It was a bright, fresh October morning. We had chosen a nearby beach. "Keep your back to the wind," he said. "And hold me up till the current catches my sail."

I hurled him upwards. He hovered momentarily before swooping to the ground.

It's no use, I wanted to say. Not enough wind. Let's go home, try again another day. But I felt his gaze holding me.

This time I laid him on the ground and stepped backwards, feeding out his line from its winder. Fifteen feet away, I waited, the wind gusted and I pulled hard.

He took off and soared skywards, his long tail streaming.

Not long after, another kite appeared. Then another. Soon a dozen or so dotted the skyline. One of the fliers approached me and we exchanged nods.

By now Dad had climbed as high as his line would take him.

He tugged, hoisting me onto my toes, and I waved back before drawing my knife. The sun hurt my eyes as he continued his ascent unfettered.

...

(First published by Camroc Press Review, June 2015.)

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