Category Archives: Poems & Stories

April 7, 2017 Poem: “At Home, after April the First”

Posted on by

NaPoWriMo 2017 April 7

At Home after April the First
(for My Great-grandmother, Katherine Hinman Williamson Schultz)
 
I remember 521 Broad Street,
that solid, brown, two-story house you built
with Emil, local pharmacist. Bridegroom
and bride, yet already quite adult,
were you—zaftig Edwardian thirty-
something—carried over the new threshold
into the hallway and polished music room?

Here is an invitation, on thick cream stock,
to your wedding. It floated for years around
that snug-built but lofty house on the bank
of the Menasha River, was somehow washed
here, to me, in the next century. And
another card announcing when town folk
could call. To announce your new rank

as a married woman, your calling card:
this one, the smallest, in thin gothic script.
A triplet of transformation. You grew
fifty years older there, went from plump to lank,
always loving (if not Emil) then a good joke,
a witty gesture or phrase turned neat,
even, Kate, when the joke was on you.

Leslie Schultz

Some years ago, I wrote a long post about this great-grandmother–part of a series of four–and there is a poem in my collection about the house she built that mentions her piano and her son and daughter-in-law. This morning, I realized, it was high time that she had her own poem.

Leslie

Check out other participants at the NaPoWriMo Challenge 2017 home site!

April 6, 2017 Poem: “A Bowl of Blackberries”

Posted on by

NaPoWriMo 2017 April 6

A Bowl of Blackberries

Like its very distant cousin, the crisply alabaster lotus,
the blackberry sinks roots deep in moist sand and mud;
but instead of a long, pure, central shaft rising
to support a single porcelain-white bowl filled with calm light,
the blackberry unspools its prickling brambles laterally—
meters and meters of looping, minute red thorns
spun headlong on tough, green cables resistant to pruning, each burning
with a myriad of fruit. Some I now see resting here:
a heap of honeyed coals, and each one alive with embers,
clusters of summer fire, alight with understory
of blood-purpled cordial, precious as caviar or eyesight or
fireflies; like justice outpacing mercy, each delivering
its complex cluster of sweet but stinging juice
with the prophetic bitter wood of seed.

Leslie Schultz

This poem started from looking more closely at things I see every day in my dining room and kitchen. I went to bed last night and awoke dreaming of blackberries, lotuses, and light.

Hope your day is full of sweet surprises!

LESLIE

Check out other participants at the NaPoWriMo Challenge 2017 home site!

April 5, 2017 Poem: “Maple, Sky, Clouds”

Posted on by

NaPoWriMo 2017 April 5

Maple, Sky, Clouds

White dappled blue, tapped by red—
looking up at the spring sky
upends my human head.
I don’t imagine I now can fly;

I feel as though I’m falling
into a welcoming well;
that something or someone is calling
or ringing a silver bell,

inviting me downward, and deeper
than I’ve ever ventured before—
Like Alice, I’m falling steeper
than the earth’s magnetic core,

and I’ll finally get to the bottom
of something I need to know,
where something waits, wise and solemn,
beneath this sweet vertigo.

Leslie Schultz

I find it both nerve-wracking and exhilarating to write a new poem and make it public on the same day. It helps if I regard it in a painterly way, as a sketch or a plein-air study. Today’s poem was inspired by these images I took yesterday in our garden, and, despite the formal differences, by the NaPoWriMo prompt inspired by Mary Oliver. (The NaPoWriMo site has a link to a rare interview with her.)

Check out other participants at the NaPoWriMo Challenge 2017 home site!

April 4, 2017 Poem: “Rain on Mars”

Posted on by

NaPoWriMo 2017 April 4

Rain on Mars

They all say it’s impossible.
Our weather wizards agree:
it’s as highly implausible
as a mesmerizing story,

or blue wisps of lyric
glued to scaffolded iron,
some scrambled chimeric
with the head of a lion.

Cold spring time on Mars
blows with blossoms of rust.
When you reach for the stars,
what you’ll find is: just dust.

Those are the facts
for what they are worth.
For magical acts
down here on Earth,

if you’d rather ponder
how things might look,
then climb up over yonder,
and dive into a book.

Leslie Schultz

This sculpture, just a few blocks from my house, is one I see most days. It inspires me, and I have been contemplating a poem about it for many months. Not this poem!  A deeper, more reflective, true-science under-girded epic was what I imagined. This actual silly set of verses was inspired by the sculpture’s name and its siting. Perhaps I can write the one I imagine in the future.

Mars has long fascinated me, too. It was thrilling to send through NASA’s visionary program of poetry and probes, one of my haiku about the red planet on the MAVEN mission. And it was fiction–specifically reading Ray Bradbury’s classic, The Martian Chronicles, when I was in middle school–that ignited my imagination about the cosmos. Still not much of an astrophysicist, but I can identify Mars in the sky these days and tell a planet from a star.

Here on Earth, I feel very glad and so lucky to live in a place that values art and science–a place of the joy in liberal arts. This sculpture project, fourth one in a series created by students at the Northfield High School, was funded by a grant from the Southeastern Minnesota Arts Council (SEMAC) with money made possible by Minnesota’s visionary Legacy Amendment, and supported enthusiastically by the City and the people of Northfield.

So, today, if I can’t be Martian, color me Minnesotan!

LESLIE

Check out other participants at the NaPoWriMo Challenge 2017 home site!

April 3, 2017 Poem “Cut: Elegy for My Grandfather, Charles Schultz”

Posted on by

NaPoWriMo 2017 April 3

Cut
     Elegy for My Grandfather, Charles Schultz

Though you were ever gentle,
when I was a little girl I was frightened
to be near you. A little deaf in one ear, you
barked and shouted, whirling
with a raised finger, a loud “Hey!”

before your smile, your joke.
I didn’t know you were (as you’d say)
tickled pink to have me there.
My visits to Kalamazoo were rare.
Each year or so, we’d go

with you and Grandma, to the Elks
Club where B.P.O.E. was emblazoned
over the door. “Biggest Pigs on Earth!”
you’d always say, with relish. Inside,
Grandma would inspect the tines of forks,

and adjust the drape of her mink
stole, which frightened me with its teeth,
thin and sharp, biting its own tail,
and its glassy eyes reflecting candlelight.
Grandma would carp and you would rail,

sotto voce, then order a round of velvet
Manhattans, a Shirley Temple for me
with three cherries. Sometimes you’d swirl
your drink with your short finger, pink-
domed, the one you’d lost because,

you said, you were a damned fool
not to turn the lawn mower off
before stooping to adjust the wheel.
I’d imagine that cut finger on its bed
of hacked grass. I’d gaze at the pickles,

the dripping ketchup. I’d go white. You’d laugh
and say, Oh, Hell! Hey! Any day
above ground is a good day!
You lived past ninety, held my daughter,
your only great-grandchild.

She doesn’t recall you as rough or mild
or remember you at all. Now, though, I can read
what you chose to blur or cut off from view.
Suffice to say, your father could be tough
and tan your hide no matter what you’d do.

Yet you survived, decided to join
a burly brotherhood, the fraternal Elks,
a new Order. Grandpa, now I can see you in that mirror
behind the bar, flipping a silver coin
in merriment—Protective and Benevolent.

Leslie Schultz

In 2016, I published a collection of elegies that included one for my paternal grandmother (“Green Grapes”) but not one for Grandpa Schultz. This winter, I have finished–well, all but the final polish!–a crown of sonnets for this grandfather’s grandfather, a Civil War veteran. Last week, I dreamed about Grandpa Schultz. In my dream, he was shouting. Last night, I talked about that with my sister–and so, today’s prompt could not have been more timely for me. And, perhaps, for him.  Leslie
Image result for Public domain photos of Elks Clubs

(To the best of my knowledge, this image is in the public domain.)

Check out other participants at the NaPoWriMo Challenge 2017 home site!