Voices Abroad 2

 

 Introducing Michael Lee Johnson, a poet from Itasca, Illinois. USA, to Voices Abroad.

   Flower Girl

(Tears in Your Eyes)

 

Poems are hard to create

they live, then die, walk alone in tears,

resurrect in family mausoleums.

They walk with you alone in ghostly patterns,

memories they deliver feeling unexpectedly

through the open windows of strangers.

Silk roses lie in a potted bowl

memories seven days before Mother’s Day.

Soak those tears, patience is the poetry of love.

Plant your memories, your seeds, your passion,

once a year, maybe twice.

Jesus knows we all need more

then a vase filled with silk flowers,

poems on paper from a poet sacred,

the mystery, the love of a caretaker−

multicolored silk flowers in a basket

handed out by the flower girl.

 

   Silent Moonlight 

 

Record, she’s a creeping spider.

Hurt love dangles net

from a silent moonlight hanger,

tortures this damaged heart

daggers twist in hints of the rising sun.

Silence snores. Sometimes she’s a bitch.

Sunlight scatters these shadows

across my bare feet in

this spotty rain.

Sometimes we rewind,

sometimes no recourse,

numbness, no feeling at all.

 

   July 4th, 2020, Itasca, Illinois

                  (At Hamilton Lakes)

 

Stone carved dreams for men

past and gone, freedom fighters

blow past wind and storms.

Patriotism scared, etched in the face of cave walls.

There are no cemeteries here for the old, 

vacancies for the new.

Americans incubate chunks

of patriotism over the few centuries,

a calling into the wild, a yellow fork stabs me.

Today happiness is a holiday.

Rest in peace warriors, freedom fighters, 

those who simply made a mistake.

I gaze out my window to Hamilton Lakes

half-drunk with sparkling wine,

seeing lightning strikes ends,

sparklers, buckets full of fire.

Light up the dark sky, firecrackers.

Filmmakers, old rock players, fume-filled skies,

butts of dragonflies.

Patriotism shakes, rocks, jerks

across my eye’s freedom locked

in chains, stone-carved dreams.

 

*This year, 2020, due to COVID-19 I watch fireworks off my condo balcony alone,

share darkness alone, share bangers in the open sky.

 

   Fall Thunder

 

There is power in the thunder tonight, kettledrums.

There is thunder in this power,

the powder blends white lightening 

flour sifters in masks toss it around.

Rain plunges October night; dancers

crisscross night sky in white gowns.

Tumble, turning, swirl the night away, around,

leaves tape-record over, over, then, pound,

pound repeat falling to the ground.

Halloween falls to the children's

knees and imaginations.

Kettledrums.

 

Michael Lee Johnson

 

 

 

 

 

Postcard

 

Voices from the Coal Shed

 

August! Holiday season! And so many of us going…nowhere! Why not send a postcard anyway? Instead of the usual “Wish you were here”, how about, “Wish I was there”?

“Wish I was there” this month’s theme for contributions to the Voices from the Coal Shed blog and the virtual museum at the National Coal Mining Museum of England. This is open to any age and from anywhere.

Send your postcard message to:    voicesinthecoalshed@gmail.com

Whether you can travel or not, everyone can wish.

 

Dave Alton

(Writer in Residence

National Coal Mining Museum of England)

 

 

Dear Dave,

 

I wish I was in Madeira on my holidays.  I would be swimming in the pool, diving for my dive sticks and playing on a jet ski if I could!

I would be snoozing and reading, and having breakfast desserts.  I would be fishing from a jetty for mullets in the sea. 

I miss getting up in the middle of the night and going to the airport in my pyjamas!

 

Wish I was there,

Daniel

 

Voices Abroad 1

 

 

Voices in the Coalshed reaches out beyond mining and its history to include a variety of voices. They may not have anything to say directly about coal mining, but the industry is just one part of the wider world.  The present pandemic has demonstrated all too vividly how closely connected we all are.

Here are three poems in a voice from Alaska - Kersten Christianson, welcome to the Coalshed.

 

Alignment of the Chakras

 

It’s June and my Throat Chakra

opens to sing to fingers eager

to type love poems, their words

captured from the wind, the tips

of an errant raven feather flipping

abandonment in the yard, the rebirthed

petals of raging violet rhododendron. 

 

Words like heartfelt, connection,

and We need to figure this out flit,

cut wake through sleep, and even

the June moon, the Strawberry

Moon, is romantic in her roundness

and name.  Both Sacral and Third

Eye Chakras argue for levity; one

 

for potential and if, the other

a reminder of distance and time.

But it’s that tricky Heart – she’s

fickle, demanding, hopeful. She

is plain in her language and shies

of woo.  Never has the written

word been easier.

 

 

Courier

 

“How now, Balthasar? How fares my Juliet?” – Romeo

 

In waking, you roll into another rusty

pandemic morning. Like a minor

character in any inconvenient plague,

your iPhone, a modern Balthasar,  you

dredge social media outlets for some sweet

 

morsel of optimism, anything to hitch

your hopeful wagon to, even a star,

but without the stench of an idiot

president, fallout still lacking a vaccine,

unmasked masses by choice, a million

 

broken hearts in the wake.  Sometimes

the peel is more fortuitous than the fruit. 

Sometimes, all it takes is an otter

juggling stones.  A blanched moose

jawbone hosting wild geraniums

 

in their short, season of sweaty dance

under hyperborean sun.  This morning,

you peruse the airbrushed photos

of celebrity marriages boasting partner

age differences of 15 years or more. 

 

Sir Elton John sagely advises,

You take it one day at a time.  And this

is rope ladder enough to pad barefooted

downstairs, humming “Rocketman,”

to start the midmorning coffee.

 

 

 

Bawdy Muse

 

Cisneros

Might well be

Bukowski’s

 

Shiny star

Sister: Thigh,

wine, bed crumbs

 

Appetite

for stanzas

sloppy men

 

                                Kersten Christianson

                        (www.kerstenchristianson.com)

 

Theme for August

Voices from the Coal Shed

August! Holiday season! And so many of us going…nowhere! Why not send a postcard anyway? Instead of the usual “Wish you were here”, how about, “Wish I was there”?

“Wish I was there” this month’s theme for contributions to the Voices from the Coal Shed blog and the virtual museum at the National Coal Mining Museum of England. This is open to any age and from anywhere.

Send your postcard message to:    voicesinthecoalshed@gmail.com

Whether you can travel or not, everyone can wish.

Dave Alton

(Writer in Residence

National Coal Mining Museum of England)

Voices in the Coalshed

Out from the Darkness

A voice deep within the Coalshed calls out,

“I know there are people with words about,

People who’ve something that they want to say;

That’s you! So don’t let you thoughts slip away.

A story, a poem, a humorous tale,

An anecdote, a notion that can’t fail

To enlighten, entertain or amuse,

With rhymes, without rhymes, anyway you choose.

And then, when your say has been said,

Wing it through cyberspace to the Coalshed.

How many words? One hundred more or less;

The challenge? The theme?

Out from the Darkness.

(90 words)

Dave Alton

(Writer in residence – National Coal Mining Museum)

Please send to:                       voicesinthecoalshed@gmail.com

   Dog Days Of COVID Summer

I radiate low esteem.

So much so that flies

sometimes can mistake me for

a piece of horseshit.

 Dissolution

I feel marginal.

Buried in obscurity.

Alive but not quite.

 On Another Hand

Thoroughly reliable

with a constant mood --

man of immense appetite,

energy for life.

 Breakfast In Bed

Though never feel, “Don’t

have enough,” always connive

to get more and more.

Gerard Sarnat

                                                                                (gerardsarnat.com)

Shadows

Nick loves walking on summer evenings when pale blue mingles with pink shrouds, especially when the moon rises, a luminous disc, orange or a pale lady. Too many corpses, more statistics, curves. He walks with methodical steps, absorbing shadows in country roads, deep and pink, dancing, darting. He observes leaning pines, each curved branch, lights from cabins snaking through pines, he is welcome. He walks slower and slower. The night settles, pale blue turned black. The morning knocks, a little too bright, country roads weary with dirt, the pines precarious. The shadows dart and dance. They can’t block the sun.

Yash Seyedbagheri

THE SOLITARY HEART

Like that weary rose,

the heart is under threat,

could succumb to the current,

go with the most convenient flow,

open to the sky’s scattered cumulus,

but wanting so much to avoid recriminations,

or to berate the weather for minor lapses

in years gone by,

a reasoning that scolds his instincts

with disquieting joy.

Reason is a trusting light, in its way,

placates the iris, wakens the sparrow’s trill.

And Fall nurtures with fluent

predictability, by shifting slightly, can be where

the stream’s downy current engulfs

and then, with unabashed adoration,

once more prove dedication,

unsullied, unrestricted,

avenge the solitary heart

given the strength to confess its trust,

all that a nurtured existence finds exemplary.

John Grey

From Coal to Dust

Streams of coal dust settle in wrinkles,

a trade ingrained forever in skin.

Egg white eyes with blue yolks

announce his Celtic origin.

Black seams of coal snake through

Welsh valley and Yorkshire dale.

Miners bent double hack away

with pick and shovel at the shale.

Coal dust turns lungs to black,

slithering unseen inside.

Shifting tons of dirty slack,

while black lung rots flesh to dust.

Now the pit heads turn no more,

their wheels confined to rust.

Sheila Kinsella

A miner and his daughter (Part 1)

He came down on his bike, she says. Bramley to Betteshanger

following the black seam.

Ants across June asphalt to drill their colonies.

Genteel Deal hung out her signs; no dogs or miners.

Shops flung cheap chops at wives

hands boiled raw, scrubbing since dawn

in the steaming shadow of the sheave wheels.

Shifts leave pitch-blind.

Face silhouettes with pinhole eyes.

Coughed his lungs up, she says. Pit dirt did him over.

Insides dark as the Kent shafts,

blood runs black.

Coal dust settles on clean sheets

seals the white seams of his skin.

Helen Price

Helenlouiseprice.wixsite.com/thisissediment

Out From the Darkness

Out from the darkness at the end of the day

The miners emerge without much pay

A long hard shift so bleak and dreary

Swathed in blackness, tired and weary

Dismal faces daren’t look to the skies

They blink as the daylight hurts their eyes

Whilst surfacing from the murky depths

In sombre mood they catch their breaths

Filling their shadowy lungs with air

Sinister coughs are everywhere

Out from the darkness at the end of the day

The miners emerge without much pay

Marian BARKER

Dark Memory

I have seen the lengths darkness will go to,

Its height, too low for comfort, and its breadth

So narrow it is closing in it seems.

There are those who’ve measured it with their lives,

Precisely calibrated increments

Of sweat.

Hope rises in cages loaded

With cutting jokes brighter than lamps,

Or weighted with spent banter winding up

From where once the darkness was hewn, kibbled

And hurried towards the sun.

I have stood

Between trapdoors and listened to darkness

Flooding the galleries, feeling that light

Has to be taken with a pinch of snuff.

Dave Alton