Two Poems
Mark Blaeuer
The Reverend’s Fantasy
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If I were to imagine Yahweh’s throne
directly overhead (or, likelier,
out at the apex of our thinly known
Orion Arm), it wouldn’t halt the stir
of sky in hemoglobin oxygen.
A reddened lamp hurls photons in night air
a toggle switch redarkens, yang and yin—
we sense another realm beyond Altair.
Unhampered, thank God, by an easy moon,
and peering at a smudge M. Messier
called 31, my eyes adjust, and soon
the finder scope stops at a live display:
Andromeda chained, left on a rocky strand,
the spiral galaxy in her right hand.
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Mark’s notes: ​​“This Shakespearian sonnet first appeared in Astropoetica and was later included in Fragments of a Nocturne. The poem was inspired by an undergraduate-level astronomy course I took in the 1970s. There were classroom lectures, of course. Indoor lab sessions familiarized us with
declination and right ascension, the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram, and things I’ve largely forgotten. Best of all, we learned our constellations on cool autumn evenings. That knowledge stuck with me, and in subsequent years I led night sky programs at the parks where I worked. The bread-and-butter was naked-eye observation, but we also made use of telescopes and other scientific gizmos.“
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Theatre of Shade
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A tall thin pine is swaying in the breeze.
That tall shortleaf is swaying in the breeze.
It yearns, yearns for a gap in canopies
beyond the shade, below hot-bristled sun.
Shaded below an energetic sun,
life reaches up for light, a skeleton
except for those few branches at the crown.
And minus verdant needles in the crown?
Just ninety-eight board-feet to sell in town,
the larder where loud pileateds eat
fat insects (under loosening bark all eat),
taproot disintegrated, obsolete.
So, covet Pinus echinata’s role—
no part is offered to a wayward soul.
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Mark’s notes: “Spending time in Nature normally recharges me, but one day I was relaxing out on the porch, feeling a bit down, and, perhaps appropriately, I wrote the first draft of this blues sonnet. The mood passed, and the poem found a home at Grand Little Things.“
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Mark Blaeuer lives just south of Lofton, Arkansas. He was a ranger for many years at nearby Hot Springs National Park, and his M.A. is in Anthropology. His poems (and a few translations from Spanish) have appeared in 100+ magazines, such as Better Than Starbucks, Bindweed, The Borough, Ezra, Grand Little Things, The HyperTexts, Lighten Up Online, The Orchards, Passionfruit Review, Pulsebeat, Susurrus, Ultramarine Literary Review, and Wales Haiku Journal. His collections are Fragments of a Nocturne (Kelsay Books, 2014) and Surfacing Below (SurVision Books, 2025). He’s also written a couple of history books: Didn’t All the Indians Come Here? (Eastern National, 2007 [out of print]) and Baseball in Hot Springs (Arcadia Publishing, 2016).
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