Two Pennies (Crush) A Very Old Poem

A woman at a grave
Flowers in the field
A farm's reflection in a side mirror

Two pennies on a track
Two trains have stopped
Before their destinations

One points east, the other west
A cricket calls, another answers
A breeze ruffles the wheat heads

She stands between two tracks
The sun is gleaming, setting
across the iron backs

freight cars waiting to be told
stop and go - go and stop
She swears she sees him

Spinning under the signals
The wind blows in the ghosts
The whole world holds

Debbie Calverley
.
.
.

Please

Please call me again
From wherever you are
And tell me you're ok

Please call me again
From wherever you are
And say it's not true

Please call me again
Laughing to tell me
your bicycle is not broken

Please call me again
to say that
you have no regrets

Please call me again
Please
Say that you're not dead.

-Debbie Calverley

Midnight, and people I love are dying. - Robin Chapman

Midnight, and people I love are dying, 

and I can't sleep so I'm up thinking
too hard scribbling these words in the dark
because the physics science news I read
before bed is making me crazy now
with incomprehension—it makes
no sense to me that gravity should exist,
what I know about is love:
that flaring up of caring connection
that lasts life-long and does not depend
on distance, and it makes no sense to me
that the speed of light in a vacuum
should be a constant in this universe
transforming at every instant along the way,
speeding and slowing, and it makes no sense
to me that there should have been an origin
of the universe and before that nothing—
surely it was everything, waiting there?
When our lives are spun out of star furnaces
and our histories of DNA mutable, shifting,
remaking themselves in us—all that stuff
of the universe spun out of nothing?
It makes no sense, and it makes no sense
that time should have a beginning and no end,
for what was the constant face of love
before time began and before matter
assembled and before that small dense crush
exploded into what, so very briefly,
would, some small fraction, run through
our bodies, changing daily, the days
of our lives—and where do they go?
Those we love? It makes no sense to me
that the light of their countenances
or the love we carry should wink out
and light, that constant of the universe,
speed on in nothingness, undeterred by loss.

ROBIN CHAPMAN

RIP

My friend
Andy Wells

Watersheds

That afternoon I smuggled lavender
behind his ear the weather was full
of bad intentions, although the sun
appeared to crack a smile.

As clouds began to scud and form
poems we were decoding became nothing
but kaleidoscopes of light and shadow.

My eyes swept up to read his face
- but it had already changed to something
unreadable and I wondered if the story
that was my face was dividing too.

I knew there were no more words
only other sounds he will not utter -
spilling into different oceans.