Hearth and Home

They included four of my poems this year.

These poems appeared in the 2023 edition of The Mildred Haun Review. I know several of the authors they published this year, and I am pleased to be included.

The first of my poems is a meditation on the use of fire.

Hearth and Home

My father banked a fire at night, so coal
burned in a furnace for our warmth, but gas
burned in my mother’s stove to cook our food.

No wood fire heated or cooked within our home,
but there was a time when hearth and home were one.
We’ll keep the home fires burning was a pledge.

To cook at the fireplace is a toil beyond
our modern thinking, but there comes a time
when I set out for the woods with my tent and pack.

I build a fire and sit on logs where
I cook my food in blue enamel pots
and watch the stars if the night is clear.

Come morning, I will blow upon the coals,
revive the fire upon my woodland hearth
and set the percolator on a grate above the flames. 

Internal Rhyme Scheme is a complex poetic form that I have never mastered. “Mike” is the only poem in this form that I have ever published, and it is a tribute to Michael Bodine, AKA The Poet Laureate of East Ridge, who wrote exclusively in the style.

Mike

With an internal rhyme scheme, he told of a dream
of California haze and his surfer days
perhaps spent in a daze after Vietnam.

I wondered about that shark tattoo outlined in blue.
Through the water, it flew as it sat on his arm
to protect him from harm. It failed in the end.

When Covid struck, he was out of luck,
no one passed the buck. The doctors tried,
but on a ventilator, he died in a hospital room.

They folded the flag and gave a salute with
twenty-one guns and a bugle to boot.
On Federal land, he made his last stand.

With hope, I say, “We’ll meet again someday
in a land far away.” We may toast him with cheer
if heaven allows beer and hear a few poems. 

Although the discussion of COVID-19 has run its course, and no one wants to hear more, I have inflicted the reading world with a poem on the subject. It is a single-stanza poem, unlike the others here, which are written in tercets.

Advice in Time of Plague

Do not Abandon all hope ye who enter here
nor let the weight of current events crush your soul.
Mourn what is lost, but not too long.
Crush the hurdle of despair and
the dark thoughts lurking there.
Pitch a tent near cool mountain streams.
Lay spoil to grim demeanor and resurrect hope.
Revel in the comedy of a fence lizard's display.
Delight in wild violets and trout lilies.
Never forget, that you are called to live. 

The golden hour borrows its name from photography and a lesson I learned well while trying to become a photographer.

The Golden Hour

Under the swirling cosmic dust, the land
is covered by a tangle of branches.
Light from overhead won’t reach the ground.

But the hour comes when sun is going down
and the angle of the light illuminates
the forest outside my door.

The autumn leaves catch fire and blaze.
Translucent in red and gold they filter light
as clouds take on the color of the sun.

Lights come on in the town below.
The highway dreams of holiday decorations
and clouds turn dark against the nightmare sky.