great blue heron
by John Grey
The great blue heron is more wary
than terrified.
It knows I’m there.
But it doesn’t dart into the nearest bush.
Nor let out a cry
to warn all others of its kind
of my presence.
But its shoreline stalking slows,
neck tightens,
head slowly turns in my direction.
The bird’s feathered crown rises.
Wings lift and spread.
Talons let go the surface.
It lifts gracefully to the bough
of a nearby oak.
No way the heron will abandon
its feeding ground.
It will wait me out.
Besides, the fish in that brown-skinned pond
are not going anywhere.
It knows me for an interloper,
that I have other places to go
for my succor, my survival.
As I turn and walk away,
I hear it floating down behind me.
Mine is a heavy roughshod gait.
The forest favors soft landings.
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. His work has been recently published in the Homestead Review, Harpur Palate, and Columbia Review, with work upcoming in the Roanoke Review, the Hawaii Review, and North Dakota Quarterly.
Water Dreams
(Lake Paupac, Pocono Mountains —1863)
by Elizabeth Fletcher
Glacier melt formed my waters
swift and slow
At my heart icy springs well
In the dawn I wait, unruffled
Soft footed, the boy
slides his log canoe in
dips his paddle
I ripple
He fishes for the speckle-bellied trout
under my shallow, sun-dappled ledges
Above us, an eagle soars
mirrored in my quicksilver
It too hunts
Sun rises higher
Heat shimmers
The boy dives in
Splash!
I wrap my soft arms around him
Like an otter he darts through my water
swift and slow
sleek and shining
A black bear lumbers to my boggy edge
lifts his snout, sniffs the air
The boy floats silently to my deep, deep
center
I hold him up in my strong arms
He waits, holding his string of fish in the
tendrils of my cold, cold current
The bear drinks, whuffs
then shuffles
back into the pine forest
At twilight the boy slides his canoe out,
his trout on a string
I slap gently against the hull
At nightfall, his campfire flashes flames
across my wind tipped waves
Starshine sprays across my face
Meteors dash across the night sky
I dream of tomorrow
swift and slow
When the boy will come again.
Elizabeth Fletcher’s career was as a technical writer, editor and program manager in the field of medical education. She is now a freelance writer. Her poems have appeared in the anthology Lost Orchard, The Swarthmorean, and Plum Tree Tavern. Her nature essays have been published in The Philadelphia Inquirer
What Comes Next
by Bob Murken
Yesterday
I said goodbye
and left you in a winter grave.
I feared you’d somehow feel the cold.
Today
your absence at the table
is the keenest kind of presence,
more than when you were alive.
Tomorrow
I will brew one coffee,
go outside where – I am told –
life goes on and you will die.
Bob Murken is a former English and German teacher who moved to Pennsylvania from New York three years ago. At 83, he’s still interested in writing, acting, music, sketching, and hanging out with friends. He and his disabled wife live in Masonic Village in Lafayette Hill. The SVJ staff remains saddened by the loss of a friend of our journal.
L’dor Vador
From Generation to generation
by Steve Pollack
Of four grandparents, three hugged me.
We walked to the corner candy store, rode
trolleys to meet a Yiddish-speaking parrot,
watched Taras Bulba in a darkened theatre.
Two grandparents swelled at my bar-mitzvah,
ten years later one lit a candle at our wedding.
None counted toes of great-grandchildren.
Assimilation, my grandparents rosy cure
being American their ironic dream.
A shande to talk about countries fled,
centuries of ancestors bones
left buried, kin left behind
who never boarded a boat,
glass shattered, shtetls burned.
My grandchildren watch Jedi
not Cossacks, ride mini-vans not trolleys.
They call out: “Bubbie, Zayda!”
running to us in contagious welcome
too young to grasp origins, too innocent
to hold prejudice. Their little arms, tight
at our waists, wrap around generations.
My life is salted, shmaltzed by a world
gone, customs saved over waves. We fast
or feast by the same lunar calendar,
chant the same ancient words, faith
not estate bequeathed. Missing the hush
of Yiddish lullabies, a severed chain
of stories untold, questions unasked.
My first language English, attire modern,
desires American. Vanity is satisfied
by simple facts, my confession is not.
I want to know of simple strengths,
bleached beginnings. Which of Israel's
twelve wandering tribes, which mother
carried my seed, concubine or wife?
Steve Pollack hit half-balls with broomsticks, rode the Frankford El to Drexel University, sailed across the equator on the USS Enterprise and across the Mississippi River to the University of Texas at Austin. He advised governments, directed an affordable housing co-op, built hospitals, science labs and public schools. Poetry found him later. He attends readings and workshops, serves on the advisory board of the Montgomery County Poet Laureate program and sings bass with Nashirah.
Ozymandias 5100 C.E.
—with apologies to Percy
by Daniel Smith
I met a traveler from a far-off land
Who told of miles and miles of fallen steel
Lying rusted and abandoned on the strand
Of a wide and dried-up sandy river bed.
Nearby, half-sunken in the arid sand
A massive golden logo lay obscured
The twentieth letter of their alphabet, he said,
Trod over by the feet of migrants as they fled.
The monument to hubris and to pride
That once stood there, the wizened traveler said,
Lies scattered now, and broken, like that land
Where naught remains of such colossal wreck
Nor memory of its cursed architect.
Daniel Smith is a member of the South Jersey Poets' Collective. His poems have appeared in the Tour of Poetry Anthologies (Emari DiGiorgio, ed.) every year since 2015. Originally from Pittsburgh, PA, he earned his B.A. at LaSalle College, M.A. at Villanova, and taught high school in Philadelphia before moving to New Jersey where he’s since retired as a school principal.