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Welcome to The Coffee Shop, just for you early risers
on Monday mornings. This is an Open Thread forum,
so if you have an off-topic opinion burning a hole in
your brainpan, feel free to add a comment.
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“We need the voice of poetry in
times of change and world-grief.
A poem only seeks to add to the
world and now seems the time
to give”
– Carol Ann Duffy
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Ezra Klein of the New York Times interviewed Senator Bernie Sanders for his podcast, “The Ezra Klein Show.”
Listen to “The Ezra Klein Show”:Apple Podcasts,Pocket Casts,Spotify,Google Podcasts,Stitcher(How to Listen)
Bernie Sanders didn’t win the 2020 election. But he may have won its aftermath.
If you look back at Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders’s careers, the $1.9 trillion stimulus package, the American Rescue Plan, looks a lot like the proposals Sanders has fought for forever, without much of the compromise or concerns that you used to see from Senator Joe Biden. That’s not to take anything away from Biden. He’s the president. This is his plan. And it is to his credit that he saw what the country needed, what the politics of the moment would support and where his party had moved, and met it with full force.
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Learning How to Make Meyer Lemon Muffins
by Catherine Gonick
“Have some sunshine!” read the note inside
the box. There was none outside, in icy New York,
but before me were twenty small suns, Meyer lemons
that my friend had picked herself, in her Santa Rosa yard.
Like everyone who’s lived in California, I knew
that Meyers were the best. A cross between
a lemon and a tangerine, colored deep yellow
inside and out, exuding a spicy scent,
they were sweet enough to eat out of hand.
I ate one. The snow on my balcony whispered,
muffins are next. Was this even possible? I rarely baked,
had never even attempted bread, but now
could think of nothing else. I found two muffin tins
bought decades ago, and they shouted, Meyer lemon
muffins or bust. The recipe asked me to blend
a whole lemon till finely ground. Boil it first,
advised…
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How to Savour a Favourite Memory
by Graham Wood
Mandarins bring my grandmother back every time,
standing with her by the old house in winter sunlight
sharing the first fruit I can remember. Four years old,
I’d wrestled it moments before from the huge tree
in the chook yard as she held me up towards it,
one of many plump tangerine disks
bobbing overhead against a sea of green.
She rolled the peel off deftly with her fingers, turning it on the point
of one thumb into large orange scoops of rind, stripping each pod
free of its pulpy strings. Then it was there! A burst of sweetness
on my tongue, elemental, never before anything like this.
Half a century dead my grandmother now,
inhabiting the long sweet breath of memory.
In spite of the decades that have vanished,
every time I peel and savour this favoured fruit
my grandmother…
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World Poetry Day, March 21, was adopted in 1999, during UNESCO’s 30th session in Paris. It encourages a return to the oral tradition of poetry recitals, promotes the teaching of poetry, supports small publishers, and helps poetry to regain its popularity, reversing the misconception that poetry is an outdated art form. It also supports linguistic diversity.
Beyond UNESCO’s lofty goals, it’s a day to ENJOY POETRY!
Shinkichi Takahashi (1901–1987) Japanese poet who was a pioneer in the Dadaist movement in Japan. He was a master of expressing large ideas in the smallest number of words. His Collected Poems won the Japanese Ministry of Education Prize for Art.
To read Shinkichi Takahashi’s untitled poem click:
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Forcing Roses
by Ranney Campbell
tent and keep clement
cover, secure,
and wait
bathe in warm water
give a sharp cut
set aside
in a vase
upon your return, blow
into the closed
bud
reflex and pull
and pour
your heated water
into her
let gravity
spread petals
untouched by your hand
then quickly upend her
let drain
to ready
run your fingers
between the folds into crevices
and gently
push
through
tips tracing
the ruffles
circling open
A version of this poem was originally published by The Main Street Rag.
PAINTING:Roses by Vincent van Gogh (1890).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ranney Campbell earned an MFA in fiction from the University of Missouri at St. Louis and lives in Southern California. Her poetry has been published by Misfit Magazine, Shark Reef and others, and is forthcoming in the Rat’s Ass Review and Haight Ashbury Literary Journal. Her chapbook, Pimp…
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Instructions for Writing a Poem
—First line after Amy Crane Johnson
by Jennifer Finstrom
You start beyond the field in back of my house.
Never mind that this is the city.
Never mind that I don’t live in a house.
Stand still for a moment and listen. The mice
run through the weeds at your feet,
crying in their small, shrill voices.
Their shabby coats don’t keep out
winter. The seeds they hoard do not
protect them. Wind comes, and makes
its own hoard of husks and bones.
Never mind that this field doesn’t end.
Cross it anyway. Carry nothing in your hands.
Previously published in Threshold LIterary Magazine.
PAINTING:The Barbed Noose with the Mice by Paul Klee (1923).
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I wrote this poem approximately 10 years ago, and reading it again during the pandemic, its absence of people feels even more relevant.
ABOUT THE…
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How to breathe
by Patrick T. Reardon
Accept air in.
Process it. Expel it.
Accept bliss and ache,
random acts of existence.
Accept other voices
or don’t listen.
Accept the flower and dog shit
or close your eyes.
Accept a journey
that starts and ends.
Accept the gamble
of waking up.
Accept limits.
Accept freedom.
Accept gravity.
Accept fragility.
Accept the cloud of unknowing.
Accept unscheduled beauty.
Accept your own sins.
Accept confused alarms,
bad intent,
the chafing of coupling.
Accept the communion of saints,
the quick and the dead,
the mob, the family, the dance.
Accept another’s fingerprint.
Accept the risk of reaching.
Accept alone.
Accept the blinding white beyond.
PAINTING:Breath by Kexin Di (2018).
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Breathing, it seems to me, is a synonym for living. So what does that entail? That’s what I sought to express in the poem. When I was done, I…
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Wilfred Owen was born on March 18, 1893. He was an English poet and a soldier, one of the most memorable and powerful poets of WWI, whose poems depicted the horrors of the trenches and gas warfare. Most of his poems which are now best-known were published posthumously. He suffered shell shock after being caught in the blast of a trench mortar shell, lying unconscious on an embankment among the grisly remains of a fellow officer for days. He was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh for treatment. While there, Owen met poet Siegfried Sassoon, who became his friend and mentor as a poet. After further recuperation on light duty in North Yorkshire, he returned to active service in France in July, 1918, and was awarded the Military Cross for his bravery and leadership during an attack in October. He was killed in action on November 4, 1918, exactly…
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dean ramser 