LP - Pride in the Name of Love - wow what a voice

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UExvBBOO238

Barefoot Abandon - Mona T. Lyndon-Rochelle

       To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the
       greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.
                       —FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA

Last night we were free     the moon     you     me.
Our lips of spiced cinnabar burned through the dark
and in barefoot abandon we dove into the sea. 

You     an azurite combustion     me     the Rose of Tralee.
We swam clear coastal waters with a great white shark.
Last night we were free     the moon     you     me. 

An offshore breeze seduced us so innocently.
We shed shift and shirt and ran to the seamark
in barefoot abandon we dove into the sea 

and rose so breathless I would not foresee
so fickle a kiss. Why leave me in the dark?
Last night we were free     the moon     you     me 

for my heart and love were eternal you see.
You singed my lips     burned your watermark
when in barefoot abandon we dove into the sea. 

You haunt my dreams with wild anxiety
I yearn for the years I lost you     my Irish anarch.
Last night we were free     the moon     you     me.
Barefoot     abandoned     I dove into the sea. 

MONA T. LYDON-ROCHELLE

The Southern Review 
Autumn 2016

After All

After all the poems I wrote
After all the times I said
After all the times you didn't
After all the times we did
After all the times there weren't
After all the times there were
After all the times I almost
After all the times you didn't
After all the times we wasted
After all the times we lived
After all the times we died
After all the times we almost made it

But there is no after all 
After all there is no more
But there is no after all

-Debbie Calverley

RIP Leonard Cohen

Mission

I've worked at my work
I've slept at my sleep
I've died at my death
And now I can leave
Leave what is needed
And leave what is full
Need in the Spirit
And need in the Hole
Beloved, I'm yours
As I've always been
From marrow to pore
From longing to skin
Now that my mission
Has come to its end:
Pray I'm forgiven
The life that I've led
The Body I chased
It chased me as well
My longing's a place
My dying a sail 

  Leonard Cohen

  Book of Longing

Late Night Conversation

Quit bitching, he typed
Delete too easy -
It's all about perspective.

- Debbie Calverley

Chicago

RIP Miss Kiki

She fought the good fight and had a great life, she will be missed!!

Purple Carpet at David Foster Gala - Seal / Michael Bolton shots

September

Everything a little sparser

Parsley with its yellow edges

Purple thistle begins the fade

We have to pull curled lettuce

And although cone flowers 

start to droop and drop

A stand of yellow autumn blooms

appears fiercely as if to protest

The cat begins to limp

in the early sun sink

September always when my heart

begins to break 

- Debbie Calverley

Gotta Love Summer.... some of my harvest!!

Thank You Tragically Hip

Final concert in Kingston Ontario, frontman Gordon Downie has incurable brain cancer, they just wrapped up a nation wide tour that went beyond magical.  The closest I could get to them was my television but have seen them many times over the years, true Canadiana!

UV

The sun became a tiny bright spot
in the closed black of my eye
uninhabited by sky
Then in my periphery
everything blood orange
yellow ultra-violet

Two boys play basketball
behind the fence
I want to be awake -
Somewhere a jet lands
a cat stretches for an instant
the world breathes out-
A sun sets deeply

- Debbie Calverley

UV

The sun becomes a tiny bright spot
in the closed black of my eye
- uninhabited by sky
everything blood orange
yellow ultra-violet.

Two boys play basketball
behind the fence

I want to be awake -
Somewhere a jet lands
a cat stretches 
for an instant the world breathes out-
A sun sets deeply.

- Debbie Calverley

Rain

Flying ant prone on the screen
Wren in full song
Staccato of distant music -

Why do we kill?

- Debbie Calverley

A Friend Makes Tea for Annette Benning

A stack of situations lies to my right

On the left, a stack of items ready

to become situations. 

Yesterday I was speaking to a friend

about people we meet along the way -

we agreed it was amazing.  A couple of days

later, a film crew knocks on his door –

can they use his house for a green room

between shoots?  A couple of hours later,

he’s making tea for Annette Benning

as she sits on his living room sofa

waiting for the next set. 

Friday, I was on the radio.  At the end

of the interview, the host tells me about

a friend of his, a lawyer who is dying

of cancer, who’s real passion and talent

lies in music.  I ask for his name.  That night

he is mentioned again at an entirely different

venue, how does shit like that happen?

We all may now collide at Vinyl Revival

where ironically, a woman that brings 

us together will be singing.

Worlds continue to collide.

There’s always an event.

And my life is not yet over.

- Debbie Calverley

Forecast

Ours was the artful
Graceful
Unreportable
Unrecordable

Prediction of

The ungraceful
Reportable
Recordable
Now

- Debbie Calverley

Seven Lessons from Brexit

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/seven-lessons-from-uks-departure-mohamed-el-erian?trk=v-feed

Happy International Fluevog Day! Their Shoes Rock.

Tapping to some cool jazz in Ottawa - the sax player is 88!

Paris

Days in gray Marais
with terror between the gorges
we parted ways wordlessly in the evening
a good poet helped me
until we found each other and drank
something at tables of weathered beauty
to forget the cold of the
path back through the air

JÜRGEN BECKER
translated from the German by Okla Elliott

Joyelle McSweeney

Sestina Ayotzinapa

Never a grave large enough, never a grave large enough
Never enough powder to ladle over the face of the grave
Never enough pine boughs to go sweeping and 'soughing'
Never enough time to make a throat for all the vowels
Never a wide enough mouth to crunch around the bones of the bird
Never enough digestive juices to leach the crime from the bones of the earth

For I am not the earth.
Never a laugh shallow enough
Never a crater on the moon blank enough for the bird
of guilt to settle. Never enough grave
maidens to prop up their chins on the Bridge of Sighs
Which is a euphemism for their exposed collar bones, release the vowels

Of the grave, the long vowels
Of flora stinking in their cells and rising up as garlands from the earth.
Never a lie like a truncheon or a sigh
nightblack or diaphanous enough
it cannot find its ear to crunch. Never a birdy
hunch that cannot find a kernel of the brain

In which to lie-or hide. Never a drain
Punched in the bowels,
Never a drug patch, never a morphine feed its unstuck button a spirit level a bird
Called 'hop-o-my-thumb' to gerry-rig up an earthy
jig as it tips its board bound body into the brine. Never enough
waves to disperse the ashes. Never enough sighs.

The crime happened but it wasn't genocide
The bodies were heaped in the grave,
but it forgot to inflorate with stains, with student i-d cards, dental records, enough
DNA to light up Googlemaps with a green pharmaceutical smile
across the face of the earth
a grin for the school photo. The Junior Varsity Ayotzinapa Birds

Rise in flock
From the earth ... Which is a lie. But something sighs
From their rotting absence which stains the face of earth
Like a pale palm raised at the wrong moment when light engraves
The film with light and as white light blinds the eye of the owl
which is Wisdom, the Huntress moon. Also white. Enough

Wisdom for tonight. Enough sighing, vows, birds, earth.
If the birds have mercy, they'll close their wings around the moon
and allow us to sleep together in our common grave.

Joyelle McSweeney

Violet

I sit down to write and end up

reading everyone else’s poems

about death, flowers and airborne dogs.

The wreath of birdseed I hung on the spruce

is gone, even the string that held it

although a circle of seed lies on the snow

in a pattern of bird and squirrel tracks.

Six blocks away a woman I know lies dying;

a violet in the snow.   Last night she did not

eat her ice cream.  Outside her window

a bird-feeder full, sits untouched.

I wonder if the birds who claimed

my wreath will migrate to where she lies
if their feathers like petals will moult into spring.

-Debbie Calverley

Blind Willie

You know after death, you have to go by yourself.
                                        —Blind Willie Johnson

Left to Itself the Heart Continues to Pound at Its Chest - Jill Osier

Waking I still see you
working the thing of us
like a difficult thermos.
You turn it like even the idea
of hands is new. Strange.
Beautiful. Wondrous ape. 

JILL OSIER

Happy 2016