April is Poetry Month with Maren Mitchell

 

Maren O. Mitchell

What we don’t know

is why do we live, and pulling up behind in second, do we live
after this one death that we know about, that hasn’t neglected any

of those before us, or those we miss, and why this planet,
are there others with relatable beings, this planet where

so many leaves, morning glory, sweet potato, wild violet, are heart-shaped,
and did we adopt the heart shape from them, finding our hearts

 too complicated, ungraceful, frightening, and why are we out 
in the elements naked, little hair, no color variations to turn on

for camouflage, and then, why does distant thunder sound companionable
while we’re outside within a mild day, adding atmosphere,

and we with no concern for those under the storms, the gods throwing
their interminable tantrums of power, yet, as thunder nears, we note

our smallness, until overhead rumbles sound personal, fate catching
up with us as we hear our clock, so we busy ourselves with cooking potato soup,

watching an old sitcom, and why, when the rain drips from leaf tips,
the outside world is a new world, clean as Eden, a mini-spring,

obviously filled with lives so much shorter than ours,
flying, mating, singing, crawling, unquestioning—being, can’t we?

                                                             —Published in Tar River Poetry, Fall 2016

 A North Carolina native, in her childhood Maren O. Mitchell lived in Bordeaux, France, and Kaiserslautern, Germany.  After moving throughout the southeast U.S., she now lives with her husband on the edge of a national forest in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Georgia. 

Mitchell has taught poetry at Blue Ridge Community College, Flat Rock, NC, and cataloged at the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site. For over thirty years, across five southeastern states, she has taught origami, the Japanese art of paper folding. 

Mitchell’s poems appear in The Antigonish Review (Canada), Still: The Journal, The Cortland Review, The MacGuffin, POEM, The Comstock Review, Tar River Poetry, Poetry East, Hotel Amerika, Appalachian Heritage, Pedestal Magazine, The South Carolina Review, Southern Humanities Review, Appalachian Journal and elsewhere. Work is forthcoming in Cider Press Review, POEM, Slant, Tar River Poetry and Chiron Review. 

Two poems, “X Is a Kiss on Paper” and “T, Totally Balanced,” have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. In 2012 she received 1^st Place Award for Excellence in Poetry from the Georgia Poetry Society. Her nonfiction book, Beat Chronic Pain, An Insider’s Guide, (Line of Sight Press, 2012) www.lineofsightpress.com is on Amazon.

 

 

 

 

 

April is Poetry Month - a poem by Carroll S. Taylor

 

Carroll S. Taylor

In Memoriam

One by one
they drop from the sky
and find their perches among
thin, lithe boughs
of a leafless white oak tree,
now a sharp silhouette sketched in inky black lines
against an ominous steel-gray sky.
Only a few stubborn patches of lichen
dare to cling here or there like crepe
left behind on the empty branches.
Dried sunflowers in the garden
hang their heads in grief and disbelief.
They know their end has come.
The mourners are wearing their funereal finest.
Sleek, ebony feathers reflect the slanted rays of
the afternoon sun but find no warmth in this place.
Shiny, black eyes survey the sight below them.
One of their own, felled by the farmer’s gun,
is strung from a rope on the barbwire fence.
A warning, a sign to his kindred.
They are not welcome here.
They might share his fate.
The mourners sit in silence,
a brief corvine ceremony of respect.
Then all at once, the service concludes
as if some unseen chorus master has waved his baton.
They lift their wings and fly away together,
each one calling out to one another
in discordant voices only they understand.
A benediction for their fallen comrade.

Carroll Taylor, a retired educator, is the author of two young adult novels, Chinaberry Summer and Chinaberry Summer: On the Other Side, and a children’s book, Feannag the Crow. She is currently hosting Mountain Wordsmiths each month on Zoom. Originally from Cataula, Georgia, she and her husband now live in Hiawassee, Georgia.