Emily Strauss

Poem Lost on the Road

A bit of poem fell on the road

a phrase copied from some
old book long out of print
I wanted to use it in a new verse
but I lost it somewhere as I walked
maybe under a leaf with its garland
of dew or the breeze pulled it away
from my careless hand

I've forgotten what it said exactly

I'll try to re-create the line
like a resurrection of images.

A camera catches a scene only once—

but I will re-draw the light, the lines
of shadow branches on the hot
gravel when the river is low
but that's not what the poem said,
the part I lost, I think it mentioned
ravens though there are none here.

 

Interview

 

1.  What does your experience of nature mean to you as a poet?

 

I suppose people write under many stimuli-- emotions, politics, divorces, etc . I used to write about my own youthful angst, but that is long gone, and in older age, I reflect more on what surrounds me. But somehow, anything other than the natural world just doesn't mean that much to me, and so even when writing about something personal (I almost never write about the external world of strife, history, cities, etc), I want to find how my feelings are reflected in non-human objects, lives, landscapes. So the natural world is almost the only world in my poetry. The natural world is everything we aren't, what we should be or strive to be, or might be. It is so much more important than we who work so hard to destroy it. It's really the only thing out there, and we are insignificant in the face of it. Thus, how I experience the natural world, and I try to do that as much as possible, even in solitary frozen camping experiences in the dead of winter, is what I want to reveal and have us consider how we are merely imprints on its surface.

 

*

 

2.  "I will re-draw the light" ... that image leads me to ask about your ambitions as a poet.  At either a macro -- career -- level, and or a micro -- individual poem -- level, what are you wishing to achieve?

 

A camera catches a fleeting image, in a single moment, but in poetry I can draw and re-draw an image from my memory as often as I like, each time nuanced differently. I am retired-- I have no career ambitions, though a chapbook might make me feel recognized for what I do. Individually, I have written so long it's a habit; I simply notice and listen, and reflect it back later. I like to show the scenes I've witnessed so maybe others can feel them too, even though they're far away, like looking through someone's old photo album. My images of the American West are almost commonplace to me, but I realize that with our international audiences (I've been published in the UK as well), what I've seen is something unique and different. I've had to explain various details of our landscape to British editors who have really no idea what I'm trying to describe. And I like to capture them for myself too.

 

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3.  Do you care to dwell in the forgotten sometimes?

 

I think I'm to the age where I am reflecting more and more on finality and decay. I'm not of the wired, hooked-in generation lost in my personal electronic bubble, so I feel as if I notice things that others may miss. I'm also writing more about silence, such a paradox, about things lost, gone, or overlooked. One aspect of focusing on the natural world is that it is often made of tiny happenings and gestures that you must work to notice, like the line of ants I saw recently carrying grass seeds across the path to their burrow. So both forgotten in time, and overlooked or ignored-- older people need to take up the slack, so to speak, and help others not forget, in their hurry, what else is around them. Maybe that's another function of poetry-- to reveal and remind us of things outside of our daily paths.

 

Bio Note

Emily Strauss is a retired California teacher and poet, who focuses on the natural world and our relation to it.

Jnana Hodson

Into Certain Sentences

 that old unadulterated formula plus inserts

just checking on this year’s dates 

remarking I hadn’t heard from you

was told you and Jack had just spoken that morning  

and were off to Florida again

What are we going to do with that wayward brother? 

a pithy note in the margin of the minutes

kick exactly where needed 

down on those knees, back into Scripture

this matter of discipline rules the house 

meaning they’ve disowned him, while Grant has surgery

in the afternoon though his wife’s pregnant 

this time with complications

am I reading too much into certain sentences 

or too little, such joys to embrace

pulleys in the wind

 

Interview

TSTmpj:  Where are the best places to overhear snatches of conversation?

Jnana Hodson:  Where not? Restaurants, before and after meeting for worship or a poetry reading, at contradances, in art galleries. I "overhear" a lot visually, too, at the corners of my eyes.

*

TSTmpj:  Who are some of your favourite poets, and why?

Jnana Hodson:  The touchstones I keep returning to over the decades are Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Roger Pfingston, Robert Bly, and Richard Brautigan.

They're all from my lifetime, for starters. Snyder's poetry is lean with an exceptionally sharp diction while his life experiences have also served as an elder for the pathways I've wound up following. Whalen's mind roams much as mine does. Pfingston's work is a model of bejeweled understatement that focuses on the most central experiences of humanity set in the Midwest we've shared. Bly, well, he always upsets my apple cart. And Brautigan's innocent surrealism is downright fun and energizing.

And then there are the hundreds of others I also cherish.

*

TSTmpj:  Do you "find" poems often?  Or are they diligent labours with much time and redrafting?

Jnana Hodson:  Most of my work originates in bits that float up to my awareness during meditation, while walking or driving, or even while journaling or corresponding, as well as the snatches of conversation already noted. Even so, I distill and hone and revise extensively to discover where the work wants to go. 

Bio Note

Jnana Hodson’s novel Hippie Drum (Smashwords) is just out.  His micro-chapbook Waves Rolling Too appeared in April 2013.

 

Mark Nenadov

5 A.M.

Beautiful butterfly's dirty diaper overflowed

and the fire truck came and cleaned it up
I could get another hour or two of sleep
if my evening emu eyes would shut
but an early bird on the wire twitters
an obnoxious worm-getting song
blasted bird isn't beautiful to me
my mind does its revolutions
are there any freelance cats
available for a hasty hire?

 

Interview

TSTmpj:  It's a knockout first line -- do you wish to share how it came to you?

Mark Nenadov:  For a loving parent, diaper changes exhibit a mysterious antithesis. Deep love of the child meets deep dislike of the task at hand, which of course crops up at the most inconvenient of times. Only love in its deepest, truest sense carries a parent along in those moments. Fleeting emotions won't. From that starting point I came up with "Beautiful baby's dirty diaper". I read that once and immediately saw that it fell flat, perhaps even hallow, cold, and distant.  I needed something warmer and affectionate. At some point, I was looking at some wildlife photography I've done and found a butterfly picture. "Butterfly" suddenly struck me as being a perfect replacement for "baby". Almost anyone, let alone a wildlife enthusiast like me, loves a butterfly. And so, with that simple change the antithesis of the poem was enhanced, the alliteration was preserved, and the rhythm was improved via the harmony of "beautiful butterfly". Now, when I say that "butterfly" made the beginning more affectionate, you must also understand that when I say "Beautiful butterfly", I say it as one who will run around in mosquito ridden forests with a field guide trying to identify a new species playing hard-to-get. That's the sort of affection I'm conveying on the baby which is contrasted with the frustration which, later in the poem, carries this bird lover to call a bird "blasted". And, of course, there is the irony that I deal with the two interruptions to sleep so differently--I quickly forget the child's interruption and dismiss it quickly but I am bitter and scathing about the bird's interruption.  This all came together in my mind to produce that line, which ties it all together right off the bat. 

*

TSTmpj:  Give us a Canadian inside lowdown on Leonard Cohen?

Mark Nenadov:  There's two answers that jump into my mind for questions like this. First, I'm tempted to say: "Who's Leonard Cohen?" Given the context, that response would be an evasive answer akin to the time Al Capone was asked about a prominent Canadian gangster. He responded: "I don't even know what street Canada is on".  The other answer I'm tempted to give might sound a bit like it came from a Wodehouse novel. "Oh, yes. He's a mighty fine chappy and quite the riot. My Aunt Agatha and him are like this".  But neither of those answers would be really honest. I think Cohen is a mighty fine artist, a genius really--but I know precious little about him and probably have only listened to a small portion of his discography. There are a handful of his songs that I could just sit and listen over and over and over, but that's about where it ends. Sadly, I've never had the opportunity to jam with Neil Young, Robbie Robertson, or Garth Hudson either.

*

TSTmpj:  What time of the day -- or night -- is your most creative time, and why do you think that is? 

Mark Nenadov:  It's the early morning for me. Contrary to what one might expect based on my poem, I'm generally a morning person. (If I wake naturally and I make it to 6 or 7 that is!)  I tend to fade away a bit in the evening. Even on a slow day, the day is so full of sensory experiences, that by evening I am often overstimulated and not well positioned to sit back and write. There are a few random highly creative evenings here and there, but that's rare--and most of my writing from evenings ends up getting thrown away. While it is a highly individual choice and there is no "right time" to do things, there is undoubtedly something about the morning.  I personally think that if you looked down the corridors of time and in one comprehensive survey reviewed history, you'd find a large portion of significant works of creativity, spirituality, contemplation, and intellectual exploration produced in the morning.

Bio Note

Mark Nenadov is a poet living in Essex, Ontario, Canada. See www.marknenadov.com for more info.

 

 

Donal Mahoney

Take Me to the Taxidermist

I told my wife the other night

when she came back to bed

my feet were cold so now's

the time for me to tell her

not to bury me or burn me

or give my body to science.

Take me to the taxidermist

and have him dress me in

Cary Grant's tuxedo, a pair

of paten leather shoes

from Fred Astaire and a

straw hat from Chevalier.

Once I'm a Hollywood star,

stand me in the garden with

that chorus line of blondes,

brunettes and redheads

I stationed there the day she

flew home to Mother in a snit. 

Years later now, my dancers still 

kick high enough to lance the sun. 
I plan to hold a last rehearsal 
once my wife motors into town 
and finds a priest who'll say 
a thousand Masses for my soul.

 

Interview

TSTmpj:  What's your favourite old movie, and has it influenced your poetry?

Donal Mahoney:  This is a tough question to answer since I have only recently begun to watch old movies on a cable channel here in the States called TCM or Turner Classic Movies. Perhaps it's available internationally but I'm not certain about that. Rather than select a specific movie I'd pick the genre called "film noir," but also adding pretty much any movie that Fred Astaire dances in. As a competitive Irish step-dancer in my teens and early adulthood, I have an appreciation for Astaire that grows every time I watch him dance. There are other fine dancers, Gene Kelly among them, but for me no one tops Astaire. From the top of his head to the soles of his feet, everything moves as one, the way one hopes a poem will move but seldom does unless maybe T.S. Eliot wrote a few. Odd that I would say that inasmuch as I admire Seamus Heaney so much. But my memory of reading Eliot as a youth when I was just starting out in poetry is that often an Eliot poem left me with the feeling that each word was a brick perfectly aligned with the other bricks caulked perfectly by the spaces in between the words and between the lines. Not an easy achievement whether Eliot accomplished it or not.

* 

TSTmpj:  When was the last time you had the stuffing taken out of you as a poet?

Donal Mahoney:  I'm not certain I understand the question precisely, Michael, perhaps because there may be an Aussie idiom involved here that a Yank would not understand. But I will take it to mean that when is the last time an editor got my "Irish up" through some faux pas that I perceived, rightly or wrongly. And that took place perhaps two years ago when an editor took it upon herself to rewrite a few words in a poem she had accepted and posted it online over my name. She thought perhaps I wouldn't notice. Prior to the moment of reading the edited poem, it had been quite some time since I had been angry the way I used to get angry as a young man back in Chicago where fights were numerous but always fair fights with fists only. No knives or guns back then. In any event the editor has a name that I and others perceived to be a masculine name so I took out after her (or him as I thought at the time). I told her what would have happened to her if she did that to a poem of any writer back in Chicago in the Fifties and if she were in town at the same time. Basically, she would have been lucky to live once the writer found her. Prose an editor might make changes to with the author's permission but literary etiquette involving a poem required acceptance or rejection as is. That was a time before workshops. Writers, to my knowledge, didn't gather around a table and critique words and lines in one another's poems. Perhaps they did and I never knew about it. But it's not something I had ever encountered prior to this instance. And I still get angry when I think about it. I can't recall if I thought her changes improved the poem or not. But I probably should have sent her a poem I once wrote about a similar situation, copy below:

A Little Like Rape

This sylph came forward

from the second row
the second day of class
and asked if
I would edit her poem
so it would read
the way it should.

I told her straightaway

that even though
this was writing class
and I was the instructor,
I couldn’t edit her poem
and still have the poem be hers.

Editing her poem, I said,

would be a little like rape,
just painful in a different way
whether she understood that
yet or not. 

Donal Mahoney

*

TSTmpj:  Have you thought of getting a Chicago bluesman to put music to this, and thereby make a million dollars?

Donal Mahoney:  Never once have I thought of having a poem put to music, never mind this poem, perhaps because I was raised without the benefit of music in the house other than Irish reels, jigs and hornpipes played on old phonograph records. I never came to love classical music the way I often now wished I had. It's true that over time I acquired a neophyte's love of jazz but didn't know why I liked it. In the process I came to admire a jazz/blues singer by the name of Dakota Staton, whose album The Late, Late Show was a big hit in the Sixties. She may still be alive today but bad times interrupted her career. Nevertheless, I enjoyed her voice more than Ella Fitzgerald's or Billie Holiday's. I think Ms Staton was very good but maybe not as good as I thought she was. The only other singer who left a permanent mark on me the way Astaire did as a dancer was Frank Sinatra. I thought that he, too, had no competition. Similarly, I thought Muhammad Ali had no peer as a heavyweight champion, much to the distress of my Irish immigrant father who thought Jack Dempsey or Gene Tunney would have cleaned Ali's clock. Not a chance, I thought, but I kept that too myself since my father was a man of strong opinions.

Here's a link to Dakota Staton's The Late, Late Show. Maybe the acoustics are off or maybe my taste wasn't so good as a young man--http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=am2oKRJdGwu 

Thanks for taking this poem and for asking these very thoughtful questions. 

Bio Note

Donal Mahoney, in St. Louis, Missouri, left his heart in Chicago, Illinois. Other poems can be found at: http://eyeonlifemag.com/the-poetry-locksmith/donal-mahoney-poet.html#sthash.IdKm9C8P.dpbs.

Michael Laubscher

At sea am I out

 

Some days -

I drift out across the sea

weightless and wonderless

boundless, horizonless.

Just to be

that which no one has to think about

or even talk.

 

 

Interview

 

TSTmpj:  What is your first memory "as a poet" of the sea?

 

Michael Laubscher:  Somewhere as a teen watching the sea and beginning to realize some of its enormity and boundlessness.

 

*

 

TSTmpj:  Can you describe what the sea means to you?

 

Michael Laubscher:  It offers much- reflection, enjoyment, uncertainty, anonymity, among others.

 

*

 

TSTmpj:  What does anonymity mean to you?

 

Michael Laubscher:  Anonymity is not something anyone wants forever, but there are times when it is a welcome luxury, and times when it is a necessity. A fine line indeed, but occasionally it offers us the opportunity of just being.

 

 

Bio Note

 

Michael Laubscher is a lecturer at North-West University in South Africa, who writes poetry and wonders about life.

Art Heifetz

The Huipil

I don’t hold with those who think

that we’re the Chosen People
but the joy of waking by your side
has almost made me a believer.
Small miracles are woven
from quiet moments such as this,
each colored strand  locked in place
as the loom moves on.
When you lay me in my plain pine box,
don’t dress me in my Sabbath best,
but in the huipil hanging on the wall
like Joseph’s coat of many colors.

 

Interview

TSTmpj:  What do you consider to be the best “small miracle” that’s helped you in your poetry writing and publishing career?

Art Heifetz:  Meeting my present wife after the loss of my son and my first wife. After a long hiatus I began to write again. Old friends at the university urged me to seek publication.

*

TSTmpj:  What was the inspiration for “The Huipil?”

Art Heifetz:  My belief that the spiritual part of life resides in small moments rather than in more structured religious belief.

*

TSTmpj:  What is your take on the status of religious poetry in 2013?

Art Heifetz:  There is a market for saccharine verse in religious journals but in most poetry journals, poems with allusions to the Bible or the Divine are anathema to the editors. Ditto to Jewish content except in Israel.

Bio Note

Art Heifetz teaches English to refugees in Richmond, Virginia. Has published 85 poems in 8 countries. See polishedbrasspoems.com.

Robert Demaree

Batterymates

 

At 73, I have long since given up

Soccer and basketball with him,

So we have devised a new game,

My grandson and I,

To play in the back yard on afternoons

Thick with the warmth of late spring.

I am the pitcher,

He the rest of our baseball team.

We toss the ball back and forth,

Field grounders and pop flies,

Each catch an out.

Sometimes the other guys reach base,

An errant throw skittering

Into the monkey grass, hidden by

Fallen azalea blooms.

My teammate, playing deep,

Somewhere between childhood and

Adolescence, applies tags to phantom foes

As they foolishly try to stretch a hit.

Our team scores a run

Each time we retire the side.

We have never lost.

 

 

Interview

 

TSTmpj:  America, summer, and baseball.  (Especially for international readers) what is your take on baseball and the American psyche?

 

Robert Demaree:  Baseball, much more than other sports, holds mythic properties for Americans, and novels such as Bang the Drum Slowly by Mark Harris and Bernard Malamud’s The Natural find in our ‘national pastime’ a metaphor for our national life: effort and dedication pay off, but not always; you don’t have to be seven feet tall or weigh 300 pounds; you can come from behind in the bottom of the ninth with a walk-off homer, and withal a poignancy, the outskirts of sorrow.

 

Poets from Marianne Moore to Donald Hall have likewise used the details of the game for setting and theme.

 

The place of baseball in the American psyche depends on a kind of sociocultural memory. Many of us look back fondly on afternoon games in rust belt cities, how even small cities and towns would have a minor league team, or an amateur team with the name of the town on flannel shirts.

 

Listen to a baseball broadcast on a summer night: not frenetic, like basketball or ice hockey, but the steady rise and fall of the play-by-play and banter, the low rhythmic hum of the game in the background, like cicadas (no batter, no batter, no batter), good company, comfortable like an old infielder’s glove, well oiled, broken in.

 

*

 

TSTmpj:  I love the sense of, in a very deep way, the young and the old being equals.  This wisdom prompts me to ask: what is "loss" in life for you, in the context of age?

 

Robert Demaree:  The setting of “Batterymates” is not, strictly speaking, baseball but one of those fantasy games that baseball inspires. It had not occurred to me before this interview that there might be a connection between the last line (“We have never lost.”) and what I described in another poem as “the abiding presence of loss.” The two people in the poem are indeed equals—they are teammates—and the loss the narrator fears is that his teammate may in time outgrow the game; that, and, of course, the encroaching of years: I do not feel them yet but suspect they are out there somewhere.

 

*

 

TSTmpj:  How has your connection with nature changed as you've gotten older?

 

Robert Demaree:  Growing older—retirement—has offered more time for writing, which in turn has quickened an awareness of nature, much of it related to the four months of the year we spend on a small lake in New Hampshire. I have poet friends who write beautifully and knowledgeably about nature, something that does not come naturally to me, if you will. So while I feel a strong acquired kinship with both goldfinch and grackle, I have to say that I value the fallen azalea bloom not so much for its own beauty and sadness, but rather as the hiding place of an errant throw.

 

 

Bio Note

 

Robert Demaree is a retired educator who's authored four collections, including Mileposts (2009).  He has had over 650 poems individually published.

 

Olive Oshyer

A Weekend at the Barattas

Friday night – headlights can be seen along the track,

Same cars and boats that left on Sunday, now coming back.

An hour or so south of Townsville, past Greenacres near Giru

Is the Jerona turnoff where hut owners chuck a left into.

Saturday morning – congestion as boats line up at the ramp

Eskies opened as it’s vital fishermen keep their throats damp.

Cast nets thrown, crab pots dropped, ‘Phew! What thirsty work,

Better have another round then see what fish are on the lurk.’

Saturday afternoon – happy hour at the ramp, fishing boats return,

Who caught what and where Baratta fishermen are keen to learn.

‘Jo was smashed up at the Five Ways, he was sure it was a barra.’

‘Pete landed a grunter at Tall Timbers but crabs all a little under.’

Saturday evening – sand flies bad, ‘Better light the smokey tin.’

‘I’ll get the barbie going soon as I finish my beer with Jim.’

In the backyard fire blazing, family and friends sit around,

‘No better way to spend a weekend.’ ‘Sure beats the life in town.’

Sunday morning – day dawning, outboard motors roar down the creek

Time to fish the run-in before the morning tide reaches peak.

‘Pass me a beer mate, pushing off that sandbar made me thirsty.’

Golden glow of sunrise becomes the reward for rising early.

Sunday afternoon – cars packed, kids’ bikes on the hood rack,

‘Catch up with you next week mate, I’ll bring over a six-pack.’

‘OK kids, time for home get this mud off the boat before it’s dark.

Next week we’ll give the front a go, where old Kev caught that shark.’

Interview

TSTmpj:  The detail in this poem is captivating.  Can you share a few thoughts on your own personal acquaintance and or knowledge of the Barattas?

Olive Oshyer:  The Baratta River system with deep holes, overgrown timbers and snag-lined banks offers anglers excellent fishing and crabbing.  About 1 km from the main Barrata River mouth is the fishing township of Jerona. To get to Jerona by road you would turn off the Bruce Highway onto Jerona Road, about 12 km south of Giru (64 km south of Townsville). After travelling 9 km along Jerona Road you find yourself in Bowling Green Bay national park which extends for 6 km until you reach the township. The national park encompasses a wetland that has gained international recognition as a significant habitat for waterfowl. There are at least thirty different species of birds that migrate to the park from various parts of the world in the winter months.  My family is fortunate enough to own one of the hundred odd homes built on the banks of the Baratta River.  Over the past thirty years we have spent many enjoyable weekends and short holidays with family and friends at our weekender.  A great place to unwind and de-stress after a hard working week.

*

TSTmpj:  Is all your poetry grounded in such distinctively Australian subject matter?  What are a few of the other subjects you have chosen to write on?

Olive Oshyer:  I wouldn’t say all my poetry is written on Australian subject matter, however I did grow up in Western Queensland and lived on a cattle property for a number of years.  I am presently working on a book of narrative poems telling my life stories which I would like to gift to my grandchildren.

*

TSTmpj:  What motivates you to write?  Why do you write, and do you do it at a similar time of day each time?

Olive Oshyer:  My motivation comes from the love of telling and recording stories along with the need to pen feelings and emotions.  I lead quite a busy life and don’t always find time in a day for writing.  Most of my writing gets done at the Barattas which is another reason why I love spending quiet time there.

Bio Note

Olive Oshyer is a retired accountant who enjoys writing and reading narrative poetry for pleasure.

Kaitlyn Plyley

Glasshouse Mountains

A thundercloud made solid

and fallen to the earth. 

A wizarded beast. 

It hunches in stone,

leaning for the migration south. 

They huddle behind curtainous trees,

a threatening presence. 

Heads swivel as the train turns,

always keeping them in view. 

Always just in view. 

If we took our eyes off, they would move

and in a flash, be upon us. 

Interview

TSTmpj:  What nurtured the poem's sense of foreboding for these mountains?

Kaitlyn Plyley:  I grew up in the suburbs of Perth, Western Australia, where everything is flat, flat, flat. You get used to your physical world existing safely within the human sphere; nothing much rises above eye level. I guess mountains - especially ones that spring up so suddenly, like the Glass House Mountains - leave me in awe. Here is something that exists independent of humans, not needing us, not even noticing us.

*

TSTmpj:  The scene you depict is more than alive.  As a Brisbane poet, what sort of aliveness do you feel, if any, from city concrete and glass?

Kaitlyn Plyley:  I suppose my smart-arse reply would be, it depends how the concrete and glass are used. Brisbane feels very alive, maybe because of the way it lives with the river. Glass walls overlook and frame the water; the bridges make it feel like a city joined. You can't spend time in this city without interacting with the river, and where there's a river there's life.

*

TSTmpj:  Can you share a few thoughts on your sense of journey as it seems from the poem, and perhaps in a wider, life context?

Kaitlyn Plyley:  I wrote this poem on the Brisbane-Nambour train, as we left the Glasshouse Mountains station. I write quite a lot of poetry when I'm on trains or planes or buses. Not sure why. Could be the constant motion, so that as soon as you see something, it's already gone and relegated to nostalgia. Or maybe it's the feeling of "real life" being suspended. Whatever it is, I do love a journey.

Bio Note

Kaitlyn Plyley is a poet, blogger and raconteur living in Brisbane. You can find her blog at www.kaitlynplyley.com.

Martha Landman

Clouds

             and I love to watch the clouds

                        -- Albert Hammond

Splendid clouds in shades of white

the mountain’s wedding dress

in silk, the moon

on late night shift

the sun / a groom in hiding

softened by the coolest mist

beautiful wedding gifts

sculpted in the clouds

the little bridesmaids — soundless

nymphs — skirt the prairies and

telegraph their timeless secrets

in passionate Baroque-tone

to God’s translucent playgrounds.

Interview

TSTmpj:  Do you often spend time cloud watching?

Martha Landman:  As a child I loved to lie on the lawn and watch the clouds and made up little stories out of it.  I had quite a vivid imagination.  I don't "cloud watch" as a hobby anymore, but whenever I walk, drive or ride and see the clouds I am fascinated by the beautiful constructions and, yes, it still conjures up beautiful tales.

*

TSTmpj:  I don't know about you, but when I think of weddings I think of promise, and hope.  The imagery of your poem leaves me, literally, uplifted and looking up.  It's also feminine in feel to me.  Any comments?

Martha Landman:  I'm too much of a cynic to make too much out of wedding fairytales. It's not the wedding that's important, but that marriage, and that is a whole different ball game. That doesn't stop me though from wild embroidery ... I have been intrigued by the fact that my poems often have a bit of a dark ending. Maybe it's my way of supporting the underdog.

*

TSTmpj:  I love the poem's denouement.  Passion and playfulness, with a sacred element.  Do you feel that as adults we lose those elements in our lives too easily?  Did you have fun writing this poem?

Martha Landman:  I'm not sure that people lose it, maybe they're just not always as aware and not treasuring it as much.  I have a deep passion for life. I'm often seen as serious by others, while most of the time I'm just having fun.  I love to play - especially with words - and it sometimes gets me into trouble.

Bio Note

Martha always loved writing, but only started serious writing a few years ago when she joined Writers in Townsville Society.