Various Poems
By: Mark Melanson

Elegy for Anne

Although we are
deux femmes suprêmes
from random decades
I know that you
and I are alike
my sororal twin

(Even though,
as you know
I, like Hamlet
lack the courage
to be a coward)

Nonetheless
I too
have two moons
which eclipse me
with such a sweet, sweet
lunacy

Each tugs
tugs with its
own grave gravitation
towards cirrus heights or
unsounded depths –
for you know too well
one cannot savor either
without its other

But I do have to ask
since we are now sisters
Are you truly a sexton
in more than just name?

Can you then toll for me
a Sanctus bell?

Thrice should suffice
I do think

Once to clear the bats,
once to clear the air,
once to clear my head

For I too dread
this time of the year
desolate November,
desolate November
with its plucked forest
gray and barren
as I am now

Perhaps
when you are
finished
with all that infernal pealing
could you be a peach
and go and fetch
a requiem shovel?

Then exhume gently what is worthy
and inverted

reinter what is not

 

Cajun Huguenot Jew

Displacement is forever
in my genes –
woeful ghosts haunt
these helix strands
                still longing to remember

Oh, how it weeps
this primal wound
wailing in the night
with a trampled faded voice

It echoes across stolen lands
invisibly blotched –
sweat, tears and blood
long ago dried and blown
               far away

Forced from Evangeline’s Acadie
driven out of Papal France
fleeing Darmstadt’s seething eyes –
I descend
from three entwined lines
anointed with an acrid balm
of loss and scorn

Perhaps this is why I am restless:
studying redrawn maps
gazing at distant stars
trekking around an unkind globe

Desperate somehow to rescue
scattered and tattered rags
of old refugee dreams
about a home

no more

 

Poetry Workshop

Warm copies circulate
papers shuffle then pass
around the poetry ring

signaling it’s time
to unveil the art
take the literary bungee jump

Echoed thumping pause
one final breath calms
before the title crackles dry

then without warning
each line speaks itself
as voice and heart accompany

till the final stanza
arrives almost surprising
like death itself

After glacial silence
I thaw with relief
as poetic judgment awaits