Writer's Block | December 28th, 2015
Plutarch, the ancient Greek historian, essayist, and biographer once said, “Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks”. HPR sent out a call for reader submissions in November via social media and we were pleasantly surprised by the response. Would you like to have your work published for this once a month feature? email sabrina@hpr1.com
North Dakota
By Julie Goeller McLain 1952-2004
Your vast emptiness encompasses me
Your wind sweeps me into being
A place where German, Russian and Norwegian ancestors, hearts rich, plowed out a piece of the prairie
Sometimes the black dirt rewarded them
Sometimes it turned their dreams into seams of doubt
Domed memories reaching out into an endless ocean sky of white clouds waving by
Sometime the plains gave them cash crops and cream
Sometimes the hail smashed the grain flat and as bent as their backs
But they kept working with tornado hope and thunderstorm courage through drought years
drinking up the prairie picking crocuses and arrowheads and ghost rocks in glacial waterbeds
while fossilized dinosaurs crouched
beneath the topsoil
waiting to be found
like the lost language of the Sioux
and the great buffalo herds
eating bromegrass
I am home
You are my past
Sustained Metaphor
by Julie Goeller McLain 1952-2004
Currently I’m canning memories of cherry evenings
Fermenting fallow feelings and melting wax dreams to seal the mason ball jar storing jellied reflections of you
I will put it on the same shelf with the sour grapes I didn’t squeeze in my homemade hurricane hurry to please you
I will drink store bought wine instead to quench my thirst
Next year leaving berries of your kind alone
Excerpts from Walden
By Aaron Crenshaw
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.
I drink at it; but while I drink
I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is.
I cannot count to one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet.
I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.
My instinct tells me that my head is an organ, my intellect is a cleaver,and with it I can mine and burrow my way through these hills.
I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts
and I judge; here,
I will begin to mine.
Goodbye-Hello
By Anna Renner
Chuck E Cheese is just like Jesus
When you're young and you don't know none
We were all twitching in our sleep
Reliving horrors we wish we hadn't done
We all need something kind to hold
It's not Prozac, I don't want a pillow
And now acting on pure impulse- Pretty please please release me
Don't control
Anything
Anything
Anything
Anything
Goodbye Good Samaritan
Bye Hobo Neighbor Man
Bye Old American
Hello Homo Sapien!
Hello Homo Sapien!
Hello Homo Sapien!
All of this intensity
We're in it whether we want to be
Or not
We must grow up now the bills are due
It's April, Sam is coming for your
Money
Just like the hunters that cannot kill
All that ambition, what happened to
Our will?
This world is messed up and I cannot breathe
Acceptance is hard and I cannot see
Clear
Here
Here
Here
Here
Goodbye Good Samaritan
Bye Hobo Neighbor Man
Bye Old American
Hello Homo Sapien!
Hello Homo Sapien!
Hello Homo Sapien!
Pushing the dark apart from the Stars
By Timothy Flick
I am standing as I landed upright sound on the ground I lifted and uprooted in contradiction toward the boundary of wherever I had been stood now.
Now, I plunge the flag beneath my footing.
Slit the ground and pound it in…
Any new found land is only old in the beginning and still it lays as unchanged as something that became the same way.
I leave the untouched nature alone by my hands which lift leaves from which dead flies fall...
By the thousands and fly away alive.
Now, I bring a long list of reasons to spread the gift of Life about and around this untainted land.
Planets revolve around the Sun but not in this picture...
A snapshot flick or flash is not an option in this situation of the Imagination.
Stick a brick in the mud on the Earth and it will not affect the planet I stand on...
Without Me wandering back to my body.
The wind blusters in the breeze and I breath beneath this state of Mind, so I split the difference... Which One can only reach by being destined to distance Zero from the tone of a belief...
To the destruction of a disease,
And leave God as approachable as Me.
Push the dark apart from the Stars'.
Push the dark apart from the Stars'.
Pushing the dark apart from the Stars'.
Let Me take the easy way out without the pressure to stress your direction because the reason for millions of Stars' is ours.
Nothing is left.
Here, to give the soaring thought a more susceptible question than what's between the how, the when, and where.
Why do we do what will instill progress to another generation born to Light the darkness far beyond the stars?
Shining written and livid rhymes really lift the Light of the sight higher in the sky than the farthest Stars'.
Farther than the lonely speck of Earth at my feet.
My rhymes travel through the spaces waves to push the dark apart from the Stars'.
Push the dark apart from the Stars'.
Push the dark apart from the Stars'.
November 23rd 2024
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By Josette Ciceronunapologeticallyanxiousme@gmail.com What does it mean to truly live in a community —or should I say, among community? It’s a question I have been wrestling with since I moved to Fargo-Moorhead in February 2022.…