This issue of Convergence, the final issue, sadly, opens with “Memory Wisp,” by Michaela Erwin. “The music box sat on / the window ledge in / Grandma’s room.” The poem draws a line from the music box, and the narrator’s love of it as a child, to her love of her grandmother. “I would hum / the melody for Grandma while / she stood tall and brunette / with wisps of gray.” With the turn, it’s decades later, the music box is covered in dust, and we sense the narrator herself feels as worn and creaky as that old toy. A nicely done poem.
“Patina,” by Roger G. Singer, has some splendid lines in it. “It was called, / ‘The Hotel’… The lobby exhibited signs of / artistic death.” We can immediately see that lobby, the worn furniture, the dusty drapes. “Strips of wallpaper peeling / Like a melting glacier.” A reminder of how incisive and insightful images can power a poem to grand heights.
Kara Synhorst has a trio of affecting poems about life in Colorado in 1921. “Arkansas To Colorado 1921” starts out: “The Kansas City Star ran the ad — / A farmer looking for a wife. / She wrote him two letters / Before she hopped on the train.” Plain-spoken poems detailing a simple life, catching our attention with sympathy for the trying circumstances, and how the characters soldiered on. I liked these poems, especially the sudden way they end, with last, small details that serve to sum up the entire experience.
“The Procession,” by Holly Day, is an amazing poem. “When we were little, my best friend and I used to hold funerals for roadkill.” They are children, with children’s somewhat callous view of the world. “really / we just thought it looked like fun.” But then the messy world intrudes. “Once, a raven we tossed into the hole / moved its beak and croaked at us, not yet dead.” The delicacy of the real concern this stirs, mixed up with the unconcern of children for a wild animal who they are supposed to be honoring, is delicious. The twist of what happens to the raven, and how the children react, raises this poem above the usual. And then a marvelous last stanza, with a great, spooky ending.
Finally, I enjoyed “A Hole In The Hum,” by Evan Myquest. “If there’s ever / Five minutes of silence / in the conversation / That’s me joining in.” As I have said, I love humor in a poem, the irreverent take on life. This meditation on silence is like that. “A vow of silence is / wasted if your sandaled footfalls / slap on the monastery floor.”
Peace in Poetry,
P M F Johnson
P M F Johnson’s book of poems, Against The Night, a wry look at the way love builds through time, is available on Amazon, and at other fine e-retailers.
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