GreenwoodGardens

April is National Poety Month! Enjoy these Four Poems by New Jersey Poets

Murmur
by Denise Rue

What brings you back from the brink—I  mean,
what stops your heart in its habitual dictation?

Apples at the market flushed with wine?
Light sluicing down from the overpass?

This morning, it was starlings, wheeling
from the west, one great breath of black.
An inky dervish, gusting and dipping until
they dominoed down on the phone lines.

Is that all it takes—
absolute, unmixed attention?
What some call prayer?

 

This
By Adele Kenny

The air is luminous, rare—I sit on the old stone bench that
was my mother’s and think of her pearls—the fragile
string—how everything rolled into a crack between the wall
and floorboards.

Here there are sparrows at the feeder, crickets in the ivy.
Sound over sound, and bees humming. On the fence beside
me, a spider’s web is strung with dust. When a cricket jumps
across my hand, I hold my breath for a second (a way of
stopping time for something perfect).

Everything that needed to be done is done. All shall be well,
and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. *

The branch above me trembles after a bird for which I have
no name; the bird turns and becomes the sky. This is the way
your eyes take in the light, the way you clear the ruins—this
is what saves you.

* Julian of Norwich

Acknowledgment: from A Lightness, A Thirst, or Nothing at All (Welcome Rain Publishers, 2015)

 

Planting, Nearest the Prayer
by Tina Kelley

You, new garden, have all the charms of a seven-month-old baby.
For a few short weeks you stay where I put you, sit up and smile.
You haven't confounded me yet. I haven't fallen behind, failed,
or felt regret. See "verve," "new ambition." See "various hopes."

What tricks will you do? Attract bees, give me edible blue flowers
to freeze in ice cubes, produce blooms for each room and for hanging
from attic rafters, herbs for a summer of dishes, seed heads for finches
in the fall. I'm curious, what will thrive and reseed and naturalize,

which will the squirrels eat, the drought singe, the trees overshade?
With compost from three years of dinners, night crawlers from the bin,
not-yet-spaded soaker hose dug in to bathe roots, you may turn marvelous.
My wine, you erase the thump in the gut, turn me capable and desired.

I want to visit you, parse the dusk birdsong, feel the spring rinsing,
the possibility of jewels, ever unmined, deep under the ocean floor.

Plein Air
by Carole Stone
 
I wish I were a plein air painter.
But my hand won’t obey my eye;
I can only tell in images
what painters copy --
 
the heron taking flight  
the nesting cormorants,
the Queen Anne’s lace,
leaning into the wind.
 
A woman paints at the shore,
her colors touched by rain.
Will I blur like the watercolor?
A gull flies in an empty sky.

 

Tina Kelley’s third poetry collection, Abloom & Awry, is coming out next spring from CavanKerry Press. She also wrote Precise and The Gospel of Galore, which won the Washington State Book Award, and co-authored Almost Home: Helping Kids Move from Homelessness to Hope. She was a reporter at The New York Times for a decade. Here's a link to Tina's Poetry Blog.

Adele Kenny is founding director of the Carriage House Poetry Series and poetry editor of Tiferet. Her poems have been widely published in the U.S. and abroad. She is the recipient of various awards, including NJ State Arts Council poetry fellowships, Kean University’s Distinguished Alumni Award, and recently, her book A LIGHTNESS, A THIRST, or NOTHING AT ALL was named a 2016 Paterson Prize finalist. www.adelekenny.com

Denise Rue's poems have been published in Poet Lore, Paterson Literary Review, Inkwell, Alimentum and Miller's Pond, among other literary journals. She received her MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College in 2003 and has taught poetry in schools, nursing homes and a women's prison. She is a two-time finalist in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest and her chapbook, A Small System of Belief, was a 2011 finalist in the Copperdome Chapbook Contest.  She lives in Metuchen, NJ and works as a psychiatric social worker.

Carole Stone: Distinguished Professor of English and creative writing, emerita, Montclair State University, Carole’s most recent poetry collections are LATE, Turning Point, 2016, HURT, THE SHADOW, Dos Madres Press, 2013, AMERICAN RHAPSODY, CavanKerry Press, 2012. Her most recent poems have been published in Slab, Exit 13, Cavewall, Bellevue Literary Review and Blue Fifth Review.

 

 

Two Poems from Christine Redman-Waldeyer and Priscilla Orr

Dogwood Tree
By Christine Redman-Waldeyer

Every spring the old tree blossoms
The blossoms are few
A blue birdhouse swings in the wind
singing to the sparrows

 

From Yearning
by Priscilla Orr                           

Her mother died on the equinox
while she drove the old canyon road
toward the hospital, switchback curves
hard to maneuver in the pitch dark.
What struck her: how lush, the desert drafts
felt against her bare skinned arms – back home,
snow seven inches deep sodden into her garden.  

How the thaw startles her –
as if buds erupted on dogwood
or yellow splurges of daffodil
shatter the sanctuary
of a life cocooned.

 

Christine Redman-Waldeyer founded the literary journal Adanna in January, 2011. An Assistant Professor of English at Passaic County Community College, she earned her Doctorate in Letters with a Concentration in Writing, Drew University. Her book publications include Frame by Frame, Gravel, and Eve Asks with Muse Pie Press. She also has been published in Caduceus, Lips, Motif Magazine, Paterson Literary Review, Seventh Quarry, Schuylkill Valley Journal, The Texas Review, Verse Wisconsin, among others. Click here to learn more about Adanna.

Priscilla Orr is the author of Jugglers & Tides and Losing the Horizon, published by Hannacroix Creek Books.  A fellowship recipient from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and a residency from Yaddo are among the honors she has received. Thrice-nominated for a Pushcart Prize, her poems have appeared in Southern Poetry Review, Worcester Review, and other journals. Ms. Orr is a poet for the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Program and the founding Director of the Betty June Silconas Poetry Center, as well as the founding Editor of the Stillwater Review. A Professor of English at Sussex County Community College, Priscilla Orr teaches literature and writing. She lives with Crosby, a Norwich terrier, in Hamburg, New Jersey. Please visit her website: priscillaorr.com

In My Garden

April is Poetry Month and Greenwood is celebrating by sharing the work of NJ poets. Poetry is a wonderful way to celebrate nature, take solace in nature’s comfort, and share thoughts that ground us in nature.

Today’s poem is by Jessica de Koninck: 


In My Garden

All fall
as your cancer spread
            I planted bulbs,

digging the soil
with a small pointed shovel
            and my bare hands.

My skin chapped, my nails
                cracked, caked and brittle.
    
Daffodils, tulips, iris --
I buried them
                and pressed down the dirt

with my thumbs and fingertips.
Then snow fell
            week after week,

covering your grave
and the bare earth
            where the bulbs slept

and later became restless.
A cool damp spring birthed a storm
            of daffodils, a fire of tulips.

As May drew to a close,
one iris only --
                tall, thin, bearded, white.


Jessica de Koninck‘s poems have appeared in numerous journals, including The Jewish Women’s Literary Annual, Bridges, River King Literary Supplement, the Edison Literary Review, and others. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Jessica is a graduate of Brandeis University and Boston University School of Law. She recently lost her beloved husband, Paul, to kidney cancer. Their daughter graduated from Brandeis University this year, where their son also attends as a freshman. In addition to writing poetry, Jessica is the Director of Legislative Services for the New Jersey Department of Education.

why i feed the birds

by Richard Vargas

i saw my grandmother hold out
her hand cupping a small offering
of seed to one of the wild sparrows
that frequented the bird bath she
filled with fresh water every day

she stood still
maybe stopped breathing
while the sparrow looked
at her, then the seed
then back as if he was
judging her character

he jumped into her hand
began to eat
she smiled

a woman holding
a small god

Thank you, Richard Vargas for letting us share you poem on our blog. Please visit his website:
www.richardvargaspoet.com

Let's Plant a Tree

by Aileen Fisher

It’s time to plant a tree, a tree.
What shall it be? What shall it be?

Let’s plant a pine—we can’t go wrong:
a pine is green the whole year long.

Let’s plant a maple—more than one,
to shade us from the summer sun.

Let’s plant a cherry—you know why:
there’s nothing like a cherry pie!

Let’s plant an elm, the tree of grace,
where robins find a nesting place.

Let’s plant an apple—not too small,
with flowers in spring and fruit in fall.

Let’s plant a fir—so it can be
a lighted outdoor Christmas tree.

Let’s plant a birch, an oak, a beech,
there’s something extra-nice in each…
in winter, summer, spring or fall.
Let’s plant a …

why not plant them ALL?

Read more about the poet Aileen Fisher,
whose poems for children were filled with a love of nature: http://bit.ly/1il3fr7