Welcome to another week of Pick-a-Poem! I hope you’ve been having a great week so far. If you’re looking for some new poetry to check out, here is your weekly installment of new verse. As always, this week’s featured poem comes from Poetry Daily, which is a very helpful website that features a new poem every day. This week we’re featuring A Month of Sundays by Kathleen Hellen.
According to her bio page on Poets & Writers, Kathleen Hellen has written one book of poetry entitled Umberto’s Night (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2012). She has also published two chapbooks of her work, Pentimento (Finishing Line Press, 2014) and The Girl Who Loved Mothra (Finishing Line Press, 2010). In addition, her work has been published in a vast number of journals, including Rhino Magazine, Caesura, Common Ground Review, and many more. She has won several prizes for her work, including the James Still and Thomas Merton poetry prizes.
A Month of Sundays by Kathleen Hellen
In the exaggerated light of perigee
I pitter-patter to the bus stop in my flip-flops.
The minute lengthening like a fenced-in shadow on
a lit-up field … the diamond sparkling, the trees like silent sentries
I can count on when a truck comes up, its headlights ducking between
houses with their lights on, lighting up the boys in gangs of three
who toss the football, a joke or two. I speak their language with a nod up,
the way it ought to be, never down, never chin tucked under.
We do it right tonight. No forgeries. No rock and dust in samples
auctioned off. The moon’s a base … or so it seemed … when was it?
years ago … a man walked on the chalked and cratered surface of TV
and seized the flicker of the future, like a baseball thrown and stuck
in some belief. A flag planted, light-yeared on what’s noble.
Michael Jackson’s Walk not jive hallucination.
I follow in the footprints, in orange imitation
of a streetlight. I give all my hopes to seas
of cold serenity, The Man in Cheese
or to a rabbit rice-cake-making.
I take the bus to somewhere on
the near side of the pie.
I hope you enjoyed this week’s featured poem. To read more posts like this, click here.
– Jet Fuel Blog Editor, Mary Egan
