Honey and Six Poems by Sharon Leiter

drop of honey
 

Street of My Life   Street of my life, I have left you and I have returned,    wandering nights in your renovated future, The deed has passed into my keeping, and the dead,    ever gracious, have agreed,    to pretend they have never left. Short, unexceptional street, lined on both sides    with two-story brick houses, Each with its painted stoop, pouring bruised-legged    children down the stone steps, With its flower pots, its wooden bench and iron-fenced    “garden,” large enough for    a single flowering tree a row of crunchy-leafed bushes, And the last house with its Florsheim … Continue reading Honey and Six Poems by Sharon Leiter

Smoke by Len Krisak

shabby stone house
 

Smoke —translated from Theophile Gautier’s Emaux et Cemées, 1852-1872   Down there, under sheltering trees: A hunchbacked hovel of the poor— Walls crumbling; roof down on its knees. Moss blots the threshold of the door. The window’s shutter is its mouth. But like a tepid winter breath Exhaled from some living mouth, This hovel shows it’s far from death. It stands there shabby, closed-in, shut. But smoke is spiralling. A corkscrew’s Thin blue thread curls from that hut: Its soul, which carries God the news.   Fumée Original French   Là-bas, sous les arbres s’abrite … Continue reading Smoke by Len Krisak