Category: Poetry
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Woman
This poem is in my first poetry book, Three-Penny Memories: A Poetic Memoir. Woman for Mom Woman, how you portray your complex essence and ambiguity.You are a study of lightcast on the walls of your Self. Shadows border your brilliance.Your portrait is askew with flavorsthat you offer to guests enamored…
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Poems for Emily Dickinson
This post is late. I should have put it up on the anniversary of Emily Dickinson’s death on May 15. She passed that day in 1886 (55 years old). I wrote the poems while attending an online Tell It Slant Poetry Festival, which is sponsored by the Emily Dickinson Museum…
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An Ode to My Knees, Whom I Named Tina and Cher, on May 24, 2023
It’s been a couple of years since my left knee replacement. A healer once told me that I needed to properly grieve the loss of my old joint and introduce the new joint to its partner. Apparently, when I had my right hip replacement, my left hip was confused, so…
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Box Turtle: A haibun
Box Turtle When the trees were young and the sun high, we had a small garden, lush with tomatoes we shared with a box turtle that would chomp on the fallen fruit. Or did my husband pick the ripe ones just for her? Her beautiful shell, the intricate patterns—did they…
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Barb’s Wordy Blurbs: Heron Spirit by Ken Gierke
Ken Gierke’s new poetry collection, Heron Spirit, is a conversation with the natural world. The poems take us from playing in leaves to lines that paddle in unison with the waves of metaphors, the lines that stretch into the endless horizon of an endless river. Nature holds bold, tall titans, sentinel eagles,…
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Barb’s Wordy Blurbs: The Weight of One Hummingbird Feather and Random Seed by Sharon SingingMoon
Sharon SingingMoon’s new poetry collection, The Weight of One Hummingbird Feather, is a tragic memoir of the loss of her son to drug addiction in early January 2023. These raw and honest poems reveal not just her son’s descent into addiction but also his healthy years of promise. Imagine a…
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Barb’s Wordy Blurbs: Files of Information on People Who Don’t Exist by Peter Mladinic
In Peter Mladinic’s poetry collection Files of Information on People Who Don’t Exist (BlazeVOX, October 9, 2024), the minutia of daily forgetting become memoirs set in free verse. With the precision of a reporter, Mladinic uncovers our deepest impulses, surrenders, and sins. A keen observer, he writes with such honesty, we…
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The Wetlands
My husband and I love to take country drives, especially to Eagle Bluffs, a local wetlands on the Missouri River. Along the way and throughout the wetlands, we have taken to counting the deer. We love sing the fawns and occasional buck. Last year we saw several bucks, even in…
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Barb’s Wordy Blurbs: Glass Awash by Ken Gierke
What immediately impresses the reader is the cover, which displays stones hewn into glass by water and time. Different shades of blue and green, shaped into tears. On the back cover, one stone, a ruby, represents the heart embraced by shadows. When I open the book to…
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Barb’s Wordy Blurbs: Me a Guest Judge for Collaborature?!
I’m grateful to Melissa Lemay, founder of and editor for Collaborature, for inviting me to be the guest judge for the month of April. I read each entry several times and appreciated the opportunity to judge each and every one. I selected an ekphrastic poem “Unstrung” by Mary Stebbins Taitt…
Extraordinary Sunshine Weaver 