I buy Fig Newtons
occasionally. They
are a communion
with that time when Mrs. Heinz
would give them to me when
Dad and Mom, Reverend
and Mrs. Hoot, would call
on her to see how she
was, to listen, to pray,
to leave. And sometimes
half the Fig Newtons would
be eaten by her kids and me.
I’m not certain when I take
a bite I don’t hear, “The body
and blood of life.” We’d walk
across a wooden bridge over
a small stream to get to the car.
The silence inside
as we drove away.
-Byron Hoot
Spare me encounters
With the self-possessed
That if uninterrupted
Use more ‘I’s’ in conversation
Than can be found
In a two-acre potato patch.
-Wayne H. Swanger
I saw it
As it saw me
From its pantry
Hideaway:
A momentary shock,
An uninvited guest,
An inconvenient mutuality,
Co-inhabitants of faded grandeur
Amidst the forest
Finally, face-to-face,
Simultaneous recognition,
Suspense suspended,
Both of us finally knowing
The source of those
Strange, nocturnal sounds
-Wayne H. Swanger
I
Light snow, the temperature at freezing,
a breeze moving the outermost tips
of branches. I sit inside. I look out
to see in like a sorceress casting bones
to read the time not yet here arising
from the past. There are days for remembering
and days for not remembering. Like the scales
of Justice, who knows how they are balanced.
The light is up, the sun hidden. “Like memories,”
I say, reach for my coffee, look outside
again wondering where I’ve put my talisman.
II
Who has not felt that treble hook
of the past sink into a moment, drag you back
into the vortex of what was and then that sense
of drowning? And who has not escaped?
Sputtering, fighting for air, saying,
"Never again!" finding a pearl in the center
of your fist.
-Byron Hoot
At times she wondered how it all would end
even after she must have known it was ended.
Sometimes when the wind blew, bringing rain again,
she cast her dreams aside and flew herself away.
Some say she lived alone against the dark side of the mountain;
some say her madness came from what she knew of flying.
But she always cried before the rain began,
from the darkness and the broken heart and the fever of dying.
I heard the rain crow just before a cold rain swept
down from shadows and across the cold gray morning.
A chill was in the air and the rain crow’s song sailed,
lost and lonely and full of old dreams, like a bird’s wings
touched by mist and magic and dark dreams folding.
Some say she kept her secrets, alone across the forest unforgiving.
Some say she calls the rain, she calls the rain,
from her own soul to cool the madness and the fever of living.
-Ramey Channell
I silently slip out
Into the grayness,
Night chill lingers
In dawn’s dew
World awakens;
Clearing its throat
With tentative chips and calls,
Stirrings on branch, in field
Alert, I watch… listen,
A crescendo of radiance
And sound inexorably bound,
Spontaneous rhapsody
Of light and melodies
Voices swell,
Birdsong at sunrise,
A fitting encomium
To this spring morning
-Wayne H. Swanger
I kept the radio on a sport’s talk station
because I did not want to hear
the conversations the drive was ready
to give if I gave silence and the way
home a chance to collaborate.
I couldn’t take that collective voice
of longing and desire creating poetry
whose purpose was to turn the car around
and drive back as if I could enter the past
by a different route without reading a sign
that read, Road Closed. That is the seduction
of the past – to find a road back.
I’ve driven enough to know that the unknown
is the only road with certainty, the one
“that goes on forever” revealing hidden beauty
and treasure and love. Still, I kept
the station on until I was out of range
and had to face my dreams and memories.
The hum of the tires like a powerful chant
keeping me from turning back.
-Byron Hoot
