Finding Poems I

In his Guide for the Perplexed, the 12th century Jewish philosopher Maimonides explains angels, miracles, and much religious writing as metaphor. “It’s all metaphor after all,” I thought when I read that. “Truth has many faces.” Talk about words that cry out for a poem! (I’m working on it …)

I read about this in a scholarly biography of Maimonides, not necessarily where you’d go to look for poetic inspiration. But poems, or ideas for poems, are all around us. Just take a walk, read the newspaper, cast your mind back to childhood.

In fact, that’s the advice of Carol Ann Duffy, an award-winning Scottish poet who delivers a delightful 25-lesson online course on writing poetry, courtesy of BBC Maestro courses. Sources of inspiration, she says, include people, places, art works, and stories. “Poets have traditionally used story in their poetry,” she says. “Perhaps the greatest of all the Irish poets, Yeats, was obsessed with Irish fairy tale and folklore. He actually believed in fairies.

Of course, you don’t have to believe in fairies to find poems in their stories, or in the stories you read in the paper over morning coffee. I’ve done that frequently and have been lucky enough to have some of the resulting poems published in The New Verse News. (A recent one, written, obviously, before the election, was Lessons from the Past.)

And then there are poetry prompts. Lots of them. One especially engaging source is the Poetry Prompt Advent Calendar from the Two Sylvias Press. Another source is Local Gems Poetry Press, which issues three months of free prompts. Just Google “poetry prompts” and you’ll find hundreds.

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Finding Poems II

Speaking of stumbling onto poem ideas, last year I read a fascinating article in the newspaper that led to the following poem, kindly published by the Sunlight Press:

Dances with Worms

          Scientists woke up a 46,000-year-old roundworm frost
          Siberian permafrost -- Washington Post, July 27, 2023

Awake at last she hurries to give birth --
a new generation of worms, far from home,
a petri dish, not permafrost

Do roundworms dream? Do they wake
to the mystery of how and when and where?
Do they ponder what happened before,
what comes next?

Hard to expect much from a worm,
but still …

Outside my window this morning
a tiny green worm dangled and bounced
on a filament of cobweb, curling
and uncurling rhythmically.

How mesmerizing its dance, how
enviously I watched -- its freedom
of movement, its grace.

Does the drive to dance move the little
being, like the drive to reproduce
moved the ancient roundworm?

The worms aren’t saying, but
never mind. The desire to dance
sleeps within me. In my dreams
I abandon the strictures of age
and gravity. And I dance.

Read this, and two of my other poems, here. Thanks, Jim!

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Always a bridesmaid …

That’s sort of how I feel about my poetry publishing history. Six chapbooks but no full-length book of poems. Oh, I put a manuscript together and entered it in various contests, but no luck. I’d like to try again, but first, I think I should learn more about constructing a poetry manuscript. And luckily, there’s help online. Here’s one source:

Order Out of Chaos: Revising Your Poetry Manuscript, by Nancy Reddy (Poets & Writers Magazine, November/December 2020)

And here’s another:

Thinking Like an Editor: How to Order Your Poetry Manuscript, By April Ossmann (Poets & Writers Magazine, March/April 2011)

Ossmann has good advice:

To achieve an order that maximizes strengths and minimizes weaknesses, it’s crucial to gain the editorial distance necessary to self-evaluate, to think like an editor. An exercise for achieving this is listing a minimum of two strengths and weaknesses per poem, as if preparing criticism for poetry workshop fellows. Some things to assess are syntax, diction, and voice; either too much or not enough description; the balance of abstract to concrete imagery or symbolism; the flow or rhythm; the presence or lack of tension or risk (narrative, dramatic, linguistic, formal, emotional); the capacity to surprise; line breaks; word choice (the best, most accurate, evocative choice for context); point of view; and the use (or misuse) of dialogue. Noting as many strengths and weaknesses as possible allows for the most objective evaluation of which poems are strongest and why. And now I’m going to work on gaining the “editorial distance necessary to self-evaluate.” Wish me luck.

You can find this poem, and two others, here.
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Speaking of marriage

After 50 years together, my husband and I have fallen into comfortable habits. We spend lots of time reading, mostly in English. But we know various other languages as well and often exchange words. How do you say it in Romanian? In Arabic? In French? That sort of talk led to the following poem, kindly published in June by Jim Lewis in Verse-Virtual, which is rapidly becoming my favorite online journal:

What Words Do

          You are yourself even while being
          another – Abdelfattah Kilito

We speak all the languages, but in English

You on the couch with your profusion
of Turkish and Arabic books

Me in the chair, cat in my lap, Latin grammar
at hand

How do you say “grammar” in Romanian, French,
Italian, Spanish …

I bring up Google Translate on the phone
then turn on my online etymology app

Sure enough, they all go back to Latin
but Turkish and Arabic are another matter
entirely

It’s just one of the ways we two are -- ourselves
but with many languages, always checking
the dictionaries

Words hover between us, waiting to be
translated, waiting to be taken in by old minds
that may soon forget them

Calligrapher, writer, reader -- we are what
words we make, what words make us

Read this, and two of my other poems, here. Thanks, Jim!

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After Poetry Month

April is all poetry, all the time. After all, it’s National Poetry Month, so there are plenty of opportunities to read, write, hear, and publish poems. Case in point: my friend Zeina Azzam, a Palestinian American poet and poet laureate of Alexandria, Va., has posted poems on Facebook every day. And this year, given the tragic war in Gaza, she’s been concentrating on poems by Palestinian writers, including Journey, by Lisa Suhair Majaj, a beautiful rumination on our path through life:

Already you’re walking down the road alone,
though you insist you can still turn back.

You’d rather not hear our grief-song,
so we offer silence, the one gift still possible.

Your body was the oldest home you ever knew.
Stalwart and reliable, it bore you across continents.

Now flesh proves traitorous, dead skin
sloughing like bark from a rotting tree—

though at the core, the wood still lives.
Don’t tell us what you see ahead.

Speak your way back to the beginning,
when it was still morning, and light undulated

off springtime fields like a promise.
You didn’t know then what roads you would travel.

You were young, and eager, and ready for life.
There was still so much time. 

Now that poetry month is ending, I’m hoping Zeina will compile these wonderful poems and publish them -- a fitting tribute to the enduring poetic spirit.

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Poetry as Community

I’ve been busy during National Poetry Month putting together a chapbook for the inelegantly named NaPoWriMo chapbook contest held each year by Local Gems Press, which hasn’t left me much time to submit. So I’m grateful that Jim Lewis, editor of Verse-Virtual, kindly published three of my poems in January. Here’s one:

I Dream of Equations

Gravitational Waves Create a Constant ‘Hum’
Across the Universe -- The Smithsonian, 6/29/23

Listen, the universe is humming.
Last audible rumble of the Big Bang
perhaps? Or the musical contribution
of angels who’ve forgotten the words?

Or, more likely, as scientists suspect,
what happens when supermassive
black holes spiral together to merge.

Whatever. I want to hear the hum,
gauge the frequency, the tone and pitch.

I watch the sky in ignorance, deaf
to the lapping of gravitational waves,
blind to any merger of black holes.

Physics, astronomy, and all the rest --
beyond my grasp, but how alluring.

I dream of equations chalked smartly
on a classroom board -- what secrets
they must hold, what treasures
of the intellect they suggest.

Tonight I watch for shooting stars,
treasuring their beauty even if I’ll never
understand the force behind them.  

For my other two poems, check here. And bear in mind that, as Lewis writes, “Verse-Virtual is … a community first. And then we are a journal.” Readers are encouraged to email the authors of poems they like, and then, as Lewis says, “Communication happens; friendships develop.” What could be better? Thanks again, Jim.

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Buzzing with Books

Belated kudos to Mike Maggio for his exceptional Let's Call It Paradise. Not that he needs any kudos from me: The book won the International Book Award for Contemporary Poetry in 2023--a well-deserved honor. Mike has moved the goalposts with these poems, exploring found poetry and collage poetry in works that examine, as he states, “the cross-pollination of social and political evolution.”

“Poetry depends on radicalizing the word, setting it on edge, turning it sideways, creating verbal revolution--all while saving meaning,” writes Maryland Poet Laureate Grace Cavalieri in her blurb for the book.

She might well be thinking of poems like “A Guide to the Signposts in the Garden of Eden,” which includes such messages as “Warning: / The Tree of Knowledge may be hazardous to your health. / Pick at your own risk.” Or the rather startling “#45,” which reads in its entirety: “Now you can wear your very own miracle. / The Spirit of Canada: / We bottled it. / A major new disturbance.”

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Reading the forthcoming Intrastate Lines, by Alexandra “Zan” Delaine Hailey, is at once heartening and heartbreaking. Zan, the daughter of Cathy Hailey, northern region vice president of the Poetry Society of Virginia, died unexpectedly at an early age, leaving a collection of writing and art. The poems here are brief but evocative commentaries on life in all its complexity and beauty. Take, for example, number 8, in its entirety: “Dream against starstruck currents. / The moon awaits your embrace.”

The four-stanza number 20, a sort of ode to the interchangeability of friends and strangers, includes these lines:

Darling, follow me
into the next dimension
where the face I recognize
is the only one I know,
from skin to bone
and back out the skull…

Zan may have traveled into the next dimension, but she’s left us what Kathy Smaltz, Poet Laureate of Prince William County, VA, calls “a love letter to life”--a letter suffused with Zan’s creative spirit.

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Watching Bees, the new chapbook from the prolific Michael Levin, is a potpourri of small marvels: observations of nature, family life, people and places, and current events, studded with classical and literary allusions. As Roderick Bates, editor of the delightfully named Rat's Ass Review poetry journal, says, the book “bears witness to what it is to be human.”

In “Dancing with the Stars,” for example, Levin encapsulates his mother’s biography: “Three photos on a desk: / my mother at age eleven, then age / doubled; then beyond.” The poem ends with stark words: “But if we should be gifted with / full vision of that ballerina dance / in awe of sacrificial pain / we’d freeze.”

The book’s title poem describes a bee dancing through cherry trees, then bumbling from bloom to bloom. The turn comes near the end: “I’m looking / at a me who’s disregarded / by a bee. Whose eye sees less / acutely, seeking out a / hive.”

Unlike the bee, Levin’s eye sees acutely indeed.

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Bzzzz …

And speaking of bees, DarkWinter Literary Magazine kindly published a bee poem of my own:

Tell Me, Bee

Experiments indicate that bees have surprisingly
rich inner worlds--Washington Post, 7/31/22

Good night, say the bees, embracingg
each other in a flower, clasping
each other’s feet.

They have worked hard today--
we know that about bees, know
they’re always busy.

But what a surprise that such tiny brains
are capable of thought and memory
and recognition.

Creativity too, I’d guess.

Their honeycomb an art.

Their buzzing a symphony.

Tell me what you’re thinking, bee

Tell me the secrets you whisper as you fly,
your dreams of sweet nectar fit for a queen

Tell me what it’s like to work together
for the hive, what it’s like to be
a being like you.

Tell me, bI must have been on an insect kick, because DarkWinter also published my “Myrmecology Report,” here.

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Double Helix

“In his masterful This Mortal Coil, Eric Forsbergh explores DNA in a series of narrative poems that postulate why we are who we are and why that matters. The poems are arranged in groups of Sequence and Consequence, using often unexpected images and metaphors. In the opening poem, “Oracle at Delphi,” for example, Forsbergh writes, “Her cryptic utterance leaves / the sense of snakes inside your tunic” and goes on to say “Predestination latches to your skin.” No science book, the novice can still learn a lot about heredity in humans from these striking poems.”

That’s the blurb I wrote for my friend Eric Forsbergh’s new book, and I meant every word of it. A Vietnam vet and retired dentist, Eric holds a master’s level certificate in Biblical Justice and brings a lifetime of experience to his deeply intelligent poems.

In a time when it seems everyone is researching their ancestry, Eric writes numerous poems about his family. Finding a half-sister through DNA, for example, he regrets that it’s “Thirty years too late to ask” his father about her. And in “Gene Silencing,” about his grandmother’s cancer, he says “24 thousand genes grew her to fruition. / But a lone wolf mutated in her colon / and led to a metastasis of caliphates.”

Other poems address subjects as various as Neanderthals, covid, the Internet, drugs, and the Mexican salamander:

Axolotl
By Eric Forsbergh

Compared to the axolotl,
a foot or so of Mexican salamander,

we tower in our mastery. Yet

the axolotl packs DNA in tenfold quantity
to you and me. If only we could flourish
half its tricks. It regrows severed limbs.

Stressed, it stages metamorphosis.
Surgically implanted with a third eye,
in time, the axolotl gives it sight.

As a boy, I feared the neighbor soldier
home on leave, for what he did to me.
Recollection’s bed contorts into a rack.

Each memory is just another protein chain.
Could a surgeon release us into freedom?
Could she amputate a memory by cyberknife?

We’d end up like the axolotl, recovering
while a healthy stump of memory
regrows, fresh and newly pink.

I’ve known Eric for years. In fact, I was involved in the publication of his first poetry book, Imagine Morning, published by Richer Resources Publications, which kindly sponsors this blog. Eric and I meet regularly with a small group of other poets to share our work and get feedback. I don’t know where I’d be as a writer without friends like him!

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The Human Whole

Submitting poems for possible publication can be a tedious business, especially when most of the time the answer is “thanks but no thanks.” Enter one of my very favorite online journals Verse-Virtual, which is a community as well as a journal. Readers are encouraged to write directly to poets whose work they especially like, and the communication can lead to friendship.

My thanks to the journal’s editor Jim Lewis, who kindly published two of my pieces in the August issue. Here’s one:

Never Singular …
By Sally Zakariya

With every step we take on earth,
they say, we’re walking on past lives.
And that’s not the half of it.

Today, as soot drifts through a sky heavy
with haze and smoke from wildfires up north, I
 imagine shards of other people’s memories
raining down from that famous cloud
where computers store their ones and zeroes.

Words, numbers, photos, snatches
of email conversations--I try to picture
who created them, who owned them
before they descended on me.

The boy studying climate change,
the couple exchanging love notes,
the woman on the brink of a breakthrough--
I almost catch a glimpse of them
surrounding me.

And there it is. We’re never truly
alone, never singular, never not a part
of the human whole.

Read them both here.

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A Voice from the Diaspora

Some Things Never Leave You, the new book by Zeina Azzam, a Palestinian American poet and activist, tells a moving story of loss and love, of mourning and celebration … the story of an immigrant who savors memories while making a new home in a new country. She stakes her claim in “Bicultural,” the book’s opening poem:

I am a tree with grafts,
the hybrid with orange and red flowers
fed with morning sunlight
watered by rains that speak
a different language.  

Similarly, in “At the Workshop on Identity and Ethnicity,” she laments that “We are advised not to write / anymore / about tabbouleh and hummos” and goes on to bid farewell to such Middle Eastern delights as mujaddara and cardamom-infused coffee. “A baklawa backlash is unfolding,” she concludes, “and I am starved for / metaphors.” But metaphors serve Zeina well in this stunning book. In a section titled The Reach of Injustice, she calls on the moon to witness her woes. The section opens with “Iraqi Refugee Stories: Three Poems for Iraq.” Here is the first one of the three, in its haunting entirety:

Bring the moon with you--
it is the only witness
to our worn shoes,
the faces we left behind.
Tether it to your arm
and bring the moon with you
a lantern to light the river,
the way to our stories.

The book concludes with poems of understanding, love, and acceptance. One of my favorites is “Peacefulness at the River,” which begins “Each day the river calls out to me. / I make a pilgrimage of thanks / at its ragged banks.” Later in the poem, Zeina writes: “All I have to do is be present / at the river’s edge.” There, she finds “… peacefulness / and the bright clarity of water.”

The City of Alexandria, Virginia, is lucky to have Zeina as its poet laureate. I’m lucky to have her as a friend. And you’ll be lucky to read Some Things Never Leave You, available from Tiger Bark Press.

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Let’s Chat

Okay, I admit it. I’m sorely tempted to play around with ChatGPT and see what kind of poetry it comes up with. I wouldn’t try to pass off AI work as my own, but I could turn over an unsuccessful poem and see what an AI bot would do to improve it. Or maybe I should just keep revising … At any rate, I’m obviously not the only person who’s thought about this. Recently, American Songwriter asked ChatGPT to write a nursery rhyme about human history. Here’s the first stanza, complete with its somewhat limping last line:

In Ages Past

In ages past, our story begins,
A tale of humans, their triumphs, and sins.
From ancient times to present day,
Let’s sing a nursery rhyme about their way.

“The opening stanzas in the nursery rhyme are full of wonder,” American Songwriter says in its analysis of the piece. “A key line, in the beginning, is, They hunted, gathered, learned to thrive / In harmony with nature, they’d survive. “But as the rhyme continues, it shows human beings begin to live less in harmony with nature and more in the business of technology and machinery. This, of course, has its great benefits and its big issues. Life is a balance, after all. “The rhyme ends with hope, as it also provides a lesson to readers: be bold but do not be ignorant of the past. Each is supremely important as we move into a new future. “With hope, in a century or two,” American Songwriter concludes, “that have more good things to say about human life.” Hmmm. Let’s wait and see.

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Meanwhile …

Now that I’m in my 80s, I can’t help thinking about what’s coming. No rush, but … Anyway, I’ve written a few poems about the end times, including this one, which was recently published in the 2023 Spring/Summer issue of Maryland Literary Review:

Invitation to the End
By Sally Zakariya

So much to treasure here and now--
     the smooth teacup in my hand
     the conversation of sparrows at the feeder
     the breeze carrying the scent of spring
Each one a small instance of goodness--
so many every day--but the stern arithmetic
of age tells me I approach the end

In sleep, some weightless part of me,
freed from the tired body, welcomes
a limitless cosmos, studded with stars,
suffused with the solace of love

Awake, I do not question the truth
behind my dreams

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Why Poetry?

It’s a good question. The poetry class I’m taking now is reading Frank O'Hara and Mary Oliver, a delightful combination. One of our first assignments was to write two small poems that talk to each other; one in the voice of the lover and one in the voice of the desired one (which, by the way, didn’t have to be a person). It set me thinking about my love of poetry, which stood in for the desired one in this assignment.

For me, poetry only drops in from time to time, but I want more. I want poetry to be a constant guest in my mind, in my heart. Instead, I get occasional bouts of inspiration, which sometimes lead to chapbooks, and I’ve just published a new one.

The wonderful Kelsay Books has graciously published my All Alive Together, also available on Amazon. The title comes from a comment a friend made while we were talking about the accumulating ills of the world. And yes, we are all alive together here on this fragile planet and beyond, should there be life somewhere out there.

“Sally Zakariya’s poems spotlight our easily shatterable life on Earth,” says Zeina Azzam, a Palestinian-American writer and activist who is currently Poet Laureate of Alexandria, VA. “In the path to healing, Zakariya enjoins us to ‘look up and listen’ to nature--the crows, the sky, the planets she imagines singing to each other.”

Speaking of crows, here’s a poem from the collection:

Crow Consciousness
By Sally Zakariya

Strutting smartly on the lawn in sleek black suits
like Philadelphia lawyers or Mafiosi
the crows convene, converse, sharp eyed,
heads nodding.

What do they know, these clever birds?

Oh, sure, they recognize the guy who gives
them peanuts. And they know how to make
simple tools to reach out-of-reach food.

But that’s not all. Aware in the world,
crows know their place in the scheme ¬
of things. Why else that shrewd chortle,
that penetrating gaze?

Why else would I sense crows have something
important to say? Something about the taut line
between spirit and earth, about thought
and memory and the great sky.

Maybe someday I’ll publish a full-length book of poetry. In the meanwhile, I hope you’ll enjoy this slender volume.

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Revise, Revise

That’s the message on a postcard from the Poetry Society of America that I keep posted front and center on my bulletin board. And it’s good advice for any writer, perhaps especially for a poet. Reviewing the final proofs of my new chapbook, I had to fight the urge to revise poems yet again. Nothing’s ever exactly right, is it?

I’ve been rereading A Poetry Handbook, by the great Mary Oliver, who has wise words indeed on the matter of revision. “One of the difficult tasks of rewriting is to separate yourself sufficiently from the origins of the poem--your own personal connections to it,” she writes. “Without this separation, it is hard for the writer to judge whether the written piece has all the information it needs--the details, after all, are so vivid in your own mind.” But on the other hand, Oliver continues, “because of this very sense of ownership, the poem is often burdened with a variety of ‘true’ but unhelpful details.”

As she explains, poems may begin in experience but they’re not “exact reportage” of that experience. “Imaginative constructs,” she says, poems “do not exist to tell us about the poet or the poet’s actual experience--they exist in order to be poems.”

Exactly. When I write about a childhood experience and my sister tells me I’ve got the details wrong, I tell her, “This isn’t history. It’s poetry.” Or, as John Cheever said far better than I ever could, “I lie, in order to tell a more significant truth.”

So keep on revising, preferably with input from your poet friends. And remember, as Oliver advises, that “out of writing, and the rewriting, beauty is born.”

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Harmony on the Page

Music, dance, nature, memories … these are the threads from which Cathy Hailey weaves her graceful poems in I'd Rather Be a Hyacinth. Hailey, Northern Regional Vice President of the Poetry Society of Virginia, has dedicated the book to her late daughter Alexandra “Zan” Delaine Hailey, herself a poet, artist, and dancer. And Hailey’s mothering instinct, evident in her long involvement in youth poetry, is made clear in the title poem:

They come in twos and threes
families, weekend walkers, visitors
from flat dry lands, kids running
ahead, dogs straining at the leash
breasting the brisk air

And yes the falls are breathtaking
worth a few selfies at least before
checking email and walking on
missing the trio of hawks
that wheel high against the blue
the woody fringe that rings
the shagbark hickory

the sharp smell of the water
with its rush and roar
telling the rocks who’s boss

My cat Monty is sleeping on my desk, possibly dreaming of becoming a wood cat. If he could read, he could find my other two poems here.

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All that Jazz

Reading Riffs & Improvisations, the new collection of poems by Gregory Luce, was like stepping into a time machine for me. The beat pulses powerfully, lyrically from the pages, from the first poem, “Music to It,” to the last, “Return to a Love Supreme.” 

If I could just put music to it
this feeling that drives me
through the Metro station
wanting to dance and glide
like a disembodied spirit
seen and not seen
between all these other bodies …

So begins the collection, taking me back, way back, to when I was single and living in Washington, DC. We haunted Blues Alley and the late-lamented Bohemian Caverns in those days, feeling the music pound in our souls. Or, as Luce puts it in “Double Bass

The plucked notes of the bass
mimic my heartbeats and then
the bow draws out a long
low moan the way your hand did
drawn across my back.

These are love poems--love of jazz, of a partner, of the city. Holding lived experience up to the light so readers see the transcendent in the ordinary … that’s what the best poetry does. In a 2016 interview with Delphi Quarterly, Luce says, “I seem to get a great deal of my inspiration in times of quiet reflection or observation” and goes on to explain that he wants “readers to take a fresh look at the things around them, even the seemingly most mundane, and see their unexpected beauty.” Take, for example, his short poem “Improvisation: ‘Better git in in your soul.’”

Better embrace it like Mingus’
bass, stroke it, caress it, pull it in,
draw it like smoke, drink it
like old bourbon burning
all the way down.
Then give it back.  

Luce, who grew up in the Midwest, has been actively involved in the DMV poetry scene for years. (That’s District, Maryland, and Virginia, not Department of Motor Vehicles.) He serves on the board of directors of DC-based Day Eight, whose mission is “to empower individuals and communities to participate in the arts through the production, publication, and promotion of creative projects.” One of those projects is Bourgeon, which showcases visual, performing, and literary arts, including, of course, poetry.

Thanks for your many contributions to poetry, Gregory Luce. And thanks for the music.

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Thanksgiving Coda

And speaking of thanks, shouldn’t every day be Thanksgiving? OK, that’s a corny thing to say, but think about it. Think of all the things you’re thankful for, even in dark days, even when all’s definitely not right with the world. Some days it’s hard to come up with much of a list, but even then, I’m grateful for the urge to write, no matter the result. A few years ago, I put it like this:

Gratitude Journal
bySally Zakariya

The Guardian

The dead shouldn’t be left alone “like a piece of luggage in a locker someplace,” says Rabbi Shloma Freed of West Hollywood’s Chevra Kadisha Mortuary. Someone should stand watch, and for observant Jews, that person is the Shomer, or guardian, who safeguards the body of the deceased until burial.

“More generally, the term Shomer has been used to describe an individual who acts as a guardian in the context of both daily routines and significant life events,” writes Ellen Sazzman in her new poetry book The Shomer. “The goal of the Shomer,” she continues, “is to witness, to attend, and to protect those who can no longer protect themselves. Under the best of circumstances, the Shomer gains a glimpse into the liminal, into what happens in the space between love and loss, hunger and fulfillment, forgetting and remembering.”

And that’s just what Ellen does in her accomplished poems, from the book’s first lines (“To Chaya”),

Before I can tell her I love her, before

I am with her and the eyes, the eyes
are closed at Torchinsky’s Funeral Home …

to the closing prose poem, “The Fast,” she keeps watch over family, love, history, and belief with an eye that is both tender and confident and sometimes humorous. (“Men like a little fat to grab hold of as long as it’s tender,” she writes in “Brisket Wars.” “Learn to make / the bloody recipe. Be generous. Brisket’s a forgiving cut, a very forgiving cut.”)

I’ve been in classes with Ellen for years and can’t read her poems without hearing her distinctive voice, seeing in my mind’s eye the picture she draws:

My Father’s Last Visit to Marconi Beach
by Ellen Sazzman

Five months before his fluid-filled lungs drown
further breath, a nurse’s aide the sole witness
to his death, we watch Father challenge the tide
for what seems like hours, his knees so swollen
he can barely stand. His unspoken wish:
to submerge into the numbing Atlantic,
to swim beyond the whitecaps following
his long-gone brothers’ flickering shadows
crooning riddled shanties. He clutches
the waistband of his too-big trunks. Waves knock him
hard against rocky sand. Already battered
by disease and its harsh cures, he lurches

up again. Finally he sits, lets the breakers
take him under. We jump fast, drag him out.

(Note how the break before the final couplet lets you know that, yes, this is a sonnet.) Published by Finishing Line Press, The Shomer is Ellen’s first book of poetry but not, I hope, her last.

The Plumber

Even the most everyday events can find their way into poems. Clearing out clogged drains is a pretty uninteresting task, but the plumber who helps us is anything but. I wrote about him recently, and Third Wednesday was kind enough to publish the poem:

Plumbing
by Sally Zakariya

The plumber comes to deal with the shower

We see him once or twice a year
this slight, dark man from Ethiopia

When he’s done he joins us for a cup of tea
strokes the cat, murmurs in its ear

I want to ask him about the civil war
raging in his country but instead
I say how I admire the churches
cut from living bedrock

They’re built by angels, the story goes

I picture cherubim with hammers and chisels
carving a haven for the spirit

I’ve never been to Lalibela, he says
I hope someday to go there

Meanwhile he scours down clogged drains
to clear away the detritus of life

The same link will take you to another of my poems as well. Thank you, Third Wednesday.

9/11 + 20

It changed everything. We remember where we were when we heard the dreadful news and saw the towers fall, images etched forever in our memories. Now, 20 years later, we’re inundated with pundits, politicians, and historians telling us what it all meant then, what it means for America now and going forward.

It’s worth listening to people who lived through it. Julia Frey, whose poem “For Ron, Dead Ten Years” appeared here a few months ago, was there when the planes hit and wrote about it--a gripping first-hand experience:

Very quietly Ron said, “You know, I think the Towers are going to go. Maybe we’d better get out of here.”

We suddenly realized that if either of the Towers fell at a certain angle, our building was directly in the line of fall. Above the raging flames, the perpendicular steel I-beams were beginning to bulge out, softening in the heat.

Again his unnaturally quiet voice, “I can’t stay here. If the Towers fall on us, I’ll die of fright.”

Her book, Balcony View: Living at Ground Zero after 9/11, is now available in a 20th anniversary edition from Amazon. That day I was in my office just a few miles from the Pentagon. Sometime later, I wrote about the experience in a poem that also appeared here a while ago and was published in the 2020 anthology Written in Arlington, edited by Arlington Poet Laureate Emerita Katherine E. Young and published by Paycock Press:

September Song
by Sally Zakariya

It seemed like the ruination
of everything yet we went on
some things got better, some got worse
and we were left marveling
at what we could handle, wondering
what would come next

Three miles from the Pentagon
we saw a rain of objects, stuffing
from airplane seats, floating,
drifting, insubstantial yet
consequential, some landing
on the office roof while inside
we watched it all unfold
in real time on the screen

Years later we are still wondering …
wondering after a summer
of destruction overseas, disparity
at home, slaughter of innocents
in the streets, dreading now
what could come next

Also from Written in Arlington is this moving day-after poem by my friend Jackie Jules:

September 12th
by Jacqueline Jules

Muscled men with sun-drenched skin
were out the next morning at 9 a.m.
fighting weeds with gas-powered blades.

After hours of watching the smoking rubble
of collapsed buildings on a TV screen,
it was a comfort to sit at a stoplight
and watch men sweat
over bushes and green grass
in the bright September sun--a comfort
to see others resuming jobs as if
the lives we led on Monday still mattered.

Yesterday's siege of smoke and sirens
had not touched this tree-lined street
too far from the Pentagon to smell the flames.
I drove on familiar roads,
flanked by buildings and sidewalks
unchanged by the dark voice on the radio
reporting the dead and missing.

Except for light traffic, the streets
appeared to lead back to Monday's
aggravation over a broken copier and
cheap toilet paper in the ladies--
not stories of spouses who saw the plane hit,
children who felt the rumble in their classrooms.

I drove on, recalling the wide blue eyes
of the woman on the lobby couch,
silent tears inching down her cheeks
while the dark voice on the radio
reported smoke at the Pentagon,
swallowing the world we knew before.

That world, “the world we knew before,” has been changed in huge and heart-breaking ways--and in subtle ways that continue to affect our lives. Twenty years on, we commemorate those who were lost. And we muddle on.

Stargazing

You don’t have to be an astronomer to be entranced by the night sky. I’m a sucker for stars, so when he talks about constellations and planetary motion, I listen with awe to my husband, who knows enough about the sky to design and make sundials and astrolabes.

Measurement and instruments are his domain; words are mine. My thanks to Gregory Luce and the good folks at Day Eight for publishing four of my poems, along with a gorgeous photo by Rochus Hess, in Bourgeon, a beautiful initiative to bring arts and audiences together around literary, visual, and performing works. Here’s one of my poems, which appeared online in late May:

Star Light, Star Bright
      “The universe is under no obligation to make
        sense to you.”--Neil deGrasse Tyson

I never asked the stars to spell your name
or said the sun should rise especially for us,
and when the full moon went into eclipse
I never thought night darkened just for us
and us alone.

There’s something to be said for planets,
how they ride their measured rings
around the sun, and something to be said
for meteorites, those rocky tears
the cosmos sheds.

But let science say what can be said
about it all--it makes no sense to me.
I watch in wonder as the heavens
wheel and drink it in, enthralled.

So when you talk of perihelion
or perigee, event horizon or
ecliptic, I nod, then smile inside
and think, how lucky that the stars
aligned for us.

You can read all four here.
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