New Beginnings Part One
Moving On by Lynn White
They said that you never go back
once you leave home.
I was sure I would
and I promised
my mother
as we packed the big black trunk.
I was homesick and in tears those
first few days in college.
‘Hay fever’, I said.
In September!
I promised
I’d come home at the weekend
And I did, I did as just I’d promised.
But I didn’t want to go.
Didn’t want to leave
all my new friends
and all the new
possibilities,
though it was nice to meet old ones again.
I had lots to tell them about my new home,
my new friends and my new place.
And about all the excitement.
I planned for old friends
to visit my new home
and they did
eventually.
And then the new went to visit the old.
But ‘they’ were right to say that
you never go back home
once you leave.
I never did.
Not really.
I never
went back
to stay.
A New Season by Judy Lorenzen
You invited me to help you set your irrigation wells,
early evening under stars,
end of August, the cornstalks tall,
plums along the roadside, purpling,
and the trees longing to turn their autumn coppers.
We were 18 and 19 years old.
I walked with you as you set each tube.
Overwhelmed, I stopped to be still in the moment,
because the moon had come out and beamed down on us—
you looked angelic in the moonlight’s covering.
The well pumped out the evening’s song,
as the moon shimmered off of the irrigation water.
The water rushed rhythmically through the ditch,
down each row through the tubes.
You asked me if we were in heaven, and I laughed.
I still remember the harmonies of that night,
the crickets, katydids, and cicadas, rushing well water,
the sound of the pumps,
rustling corn leaves in that field off Highway 30.
I felt the callouses on your hand when you grabbed mine
and told me I should marry you—
promising we’d always be rich in green fields and grasses
and in the music of the cicadas and rains,
and every night under the big sky,
we could gaze at the Milky Way together.
You told me if I married you,
I’d be marrying this countryside, too.
You finished setting your pumps,
and we got in your truck to go to the next field.
I turned the radio on, and Karen Carpenter was singing
“We’ve Only Just Begun.”
You told me I’d love the harvest season.
I asked about the winters on the farm.
You said the snows would come,
but I’d never be cold.
I said yes.
The Best We Can Do by Arlene Levine
A rose bush wilting in July heat
does not blame the earth, lets its roots
search deep for the waters of life.
After its surge of golden glory
the bare oak does not accuse
the winter’s frigid air, invites
the wind to sing hymns through
its naked boughs.
The best we can do is to allow,
learn to love the changing
landscape of our lives.
Episodes of dark and doubt
are unexpected guests, asking only
to be welcomed for a while,
these gods in disguise
who guide us home.
Two poems by Sharon Waller Knutson
After I find your lifeless body on the floor
For days the sky grows dark
and pours buckets of rain
on the thirsty ground,
I curl under the covers
in a fetal position
awash in a sea of sleep
Frozen in fear of the future
and gripped
in the jaws of grief.
Today the sun shines brightly
and I watch a rabbit roll
in a blanket of green grass.
In Limbo
When my husband’s soul
floats out of his body
and leaves me on earth,
I beg him to come back
and get me and take me
with him to the Hereafter,
I am ready to shed my body
and material possessions
to be with him as we hold hands
And reunite with long lost
relatives but he does not listen
and I am still in this crazy world.
You still have a purpose,
our son says, but all I feel
is sadness and sorrow.
Summer in January by Joan Leotta
(Inspired by a poem by Lorette Luca—Winter in June)
A world upside down.(for me)
below the equator, kigo shifts—
summer’s heat fills January days.
If my father had moved us
to Melbourne Australia
I could have had
a merry go round pull
into the drive on my birthday,
like my June-birthday
cousin enjoyed.
Instead, my friends slogged
through snow to drink
hot chocolate before
games and cake.
In Melbourne, no one
would have left early
for fear of icy roads.
But if my birthday came
in summer, after the party,
I would not have
been able to go out
to our backyard and
feel the crunch of my
skate blades digging
into the ice in the rink
my father built.
In Melbourne,
the setting January sun
would not turn my
skate shavings
into sprays of tiny
diamonds as I practiced
turns and twirls.
Thinking on these things,
I no longer envy those
with summer birthdays,
whenever, wherever
summer comes.
I'm content to be a winter baby.
Two poems by Laurie Kuntz
To Be Born On a Full Moon Eclipse
Sept 2025
A harvest moon, a blood moon,
a full moon eclipse.
It is the eclipse that will stand out
on the marked day of your arrival
a pocket of shadows coming between
what is neither a planet or a star
but when it passes it uncovers the light
that is always there for the sharing.
Haiku
In the sea
of broken lives
floats a threadbare promise.
Haiku by Lauren McBride
January bills
still using
Christmas stamps
Three poems by Joanne Durham
Anticipation
Sages warn, Live in the present,
longing, hunger can do you in,
my Mom in her last days
paced room to room
with walker and oxygen,
there’s nothing to look forward to.
Clutched in the grip
of a global pandemic,
the sonogram of that child-to-be
releases a smile so deep
I think it’s from my own womb
not my daughter’s,
breaks my fast on joy,
spreads its feast across my face.
She carries tomorrow
in her belly - yes, I’ll take
rapture-in-the-making.
First published in To Drink from a Wider Bowl, Evening Street Press
Everything
was built in–
clothes bureau, Murphy bed,
in that studio apartment
on Treat Street, the first place
I lived alone.
You could run your fingers
over the gentle curve
of the hallway shelf
and ride its wave. Everything
else in my life stood still,
even the plant in its glazed pot
took the weekly drink I gave it
silently. I waited
for the tide to rise, sweep in
something of my own.
First published in One Art, ©Joanne Durham
Next Time
Kneeling to scrub the floor, the tangy smell
of vinegar suffuses me, my rag loosens
tiny nibs of dirt ground into wood. They rise
like bubbles eager for release. There’s pleasure
in seeing the grains regain their lightness.
Such a long time it took me to learn
no elf or genie would tend to it.
Even the garden I somehow expected
to keep its shape, the rhododendron to purple
year after year without pruning or feeding. The ivy,
leaves poking along the side of the house,
seemed just a casual visitor until one day
I saw how it was tangled all through the azaleas,
smothering their roots. I still think
that there’s another chance
for everything. I’d have more kids next time,
wouldn’t be afraid to scramble down the mountain
to the hidden hollow of the Pacific coast.
It would be some different version of myself
who accompanies the old me only as far
as the ticket counter, bids me a good journey
as I clutch my sagging suitcase,
grab the railing with the other hand
and hoist myself onto the outbound train.
First published in Hole in the Head Review,
