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Carmen Luminis Deo

Were they Your songs, the sonnets we compose?
When angels hymn your praise, what dove descends
in spiritu on us, ’til we repose
in poetry no nightingale transcends?
 
Can our communion, Lord, with you compare
Eternity in prophecies of death
we poets through our mortal verse declare
to be Your Will until our dying breath?
 
If Homer soothed once proud Achilles’ heart,
if Dante’s Paradiso raised the dead,
perhaps our fairest sonnets may impart 
a sense of Grace through every phrase they thread.
 
Carmen luminis Deo*, allay our sins,
and lightly play, attuned to violins
 
  
 
*The Song of Light to God  

© Richard Vallance

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Summer In The City

Under lush Maple
Straightback chair
Pushed close to its
Generous shade -
Closing her eyes
To the soft breeze lull -
A terrier its black
Fur reeking with axel
Grease under an old Chevy
On cinderblocks -
Galvanized clotheslines
Twanging in the warm breeze -
Marionettes in lethargic dance
On line -

The dog moved deeper
Under his motor retreat. . .
Sun hanging low -
Old popsticks
Oil slicks
In the asphalt street. . .
Yucca leaning heavily
Surrounding the cyclone fence-
Waxy white bells scattering
confetti in the wedded heat -

The old woman startled
In sleep -
Drifting back into slumber. . .
The small dog
Retreating into the cool
Tomb of the cellar behind
The chalet house -
Its red gingerbread lattice
Straining -
Chunks ready to crash into
The garden’s explosion -
As the sun drips molten
Over a searing Earth. . .

© Dolores Guglielmo

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Altai

When you speak,
I hear kargyraa,

or the soft bowing
of a single string

with which
a thousand others sound,

struck into vibration
as if, at a thought,

Aeolus
breathed upon them.

When you whisper,
it is the steppe-grass

bending,
obedient to the wind.

When you kiss me,
your lips are buzzing;

the music moves
from your mouth

to mine 

© Marie Marshal

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When The Party Begins

I forgot to think about you today:
intrusion from malicious nostalgia
failed to dissect meat from the bone.
I swam in a tide of mundanity
without hoping for memory’s current
to bring me back to familiar shores.
My comeback now hides in exhausted smiles
unwilling to rescue you from the past.

Once, you threw sand in the eyes of my dreams,
blinding with dependence, an oasis
that had always been more than a mirage.
But sound the alarm in the form of sighs;
for I have escaped the moping coward
who drained the desire to recreate fire.
Music once taunting of days filled with loss
now celebrates warmth in embers of hope.

© Mike Gwynne

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