Three Poems
Janice D. Soderling
Good Friday
Throughout the day, we weren’t allowed to laugh,
but, chafing at restricted wriggle-room,
were charged to sit bereft on Christ’s behalf,
rebellious in the stifling midday gloom.
Our petty sins and shortfalls fostered grief.
We sat disconsolate; we sat long-faced
and quaking with no promise of relief.
Our thoughts were neither dutiful nor chaste.
Abysmal brimstone pits of smoke and flame.
Eternal torment, worms and endless woe.
Good Friday was ordained for guilt and shame.
Hellfire and sure damnation weighed us low.
Such heavy burdens for a child to bear:
hedonic spring exploding everywhere.
- - -
Fissures
At owl-light I follow the long stone wall
through quickening green where nettles sprawl.
My thoughts are not busy with you at all.
Or the curlew crying.
Little is left of the rough-edged chill,
only clear rivulets surging downhill
where the lake’s ice cover breaks sharp and shrill.
Like the curlew crying.
Too early for coltsfoot. Too late for all-heal.
Cranes bugle and lift. Larks spiral and peal.
There’s nothing can comfort the rending I feel.
And the curlew crying.
- - -
April is the cruelest month for poets
The cruelest month’s gotta be April
Cause you can’t write a limerick on April
there’s not one smutty rhyme
for erotic springtime
There’s not even a clean rhyme for April.
- - -
Janice’s notes: “Ah, spring! Rain falls. Sap rises. The old bear and the old poet emerge hungry from a winter lair.
“Ah, war! Bombs fall, smoke rises. The orphaned child emerges dazed from the rubble, also hungry.
“Some mourn their brother’s death. Others mourn the rising price of gasoline.
“Awakening is a transition from dormancy to awareness, whether physical or mental.
“What yesterday seemed important is trivia today. Nonetheless, here it is, credit and gratitude where it is owed: ‘Good Friday’ was first published at The Innisfree Poetry Journal; ‘Fissures’ at Mezzo Cammin; ‘April is the cruelest month’ at New Verse News and as a video at Poetry Storehouse.”
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Janice D. Soderling has work in a variety of international journals, some defunct, others, like her, still chugging away. She is represented in anthologies wth prose and poetry. Her most recent collections are The Women Come and Go, Talking (poems), and Our Lives Were Supposed to Be Different (short fiction and flash), both under the imprint of Kultivera Productions.
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