Monday, August 28, 2017

A window to my past. by Mark W. Ó Brien


"After Hart." ("A Scene in the Helderbergs near Albany.")
© Mark W. Ó Brien 2017

Recently it was the anniversary of my Mom's death. So it seemed appropriate to take my daughter and granddaughter to one of her favorite places. 

One of the fondest memories of my youth is that of walking through museums with my mother. 

Many was the summer when we wandered through every museum from Glens Falls to Albany to Williamstown Mass. and Bennington Vermont. 

One summer I remember she read someplace about the burgeoning art of gravestone rubbing. The next thing you know she dragged us to Vermont to make a rubbing of Robert Frost's gravestone!

By far Mom's favorite museum was the Albany Museum of History and Art and it was always a highlight of my summer when we went to see "The Albany Mummies." Capped off by seeing The Hudson River School Landscape paintings!

Mom was an amateur landscape painter who never got to fulfill her dream of art college because "Women didn't go to college back then."

So, when I reached college age and wanted to go to art school she happily lived vicariously through me.

When my children were born I did likewise by taking them to museums whenever I got the chance. By then there was also the New York State Museum in the Empire State Plaza. 

My kids still talk about the time I took him to see an exhibit on the making of windows. They sat with me through the most boring slow paced movie about handmade windows ever produced. I loved it! And they enjoyed it just because they were with me.

The other day, for the first time, I went to the Albany institute of history and art with my daughter Sarah and my granddaughter Josephine. Passing on a tradition now four generations long and strong!

~

I miss my mother
And our walks through museums
She taught me how to see.

~

© Mark W. Ó Brien 2017

Monday, August 21, 2017

The Orchestra at Sunrise by Aida I. DePascale

"Stovepipe Sunrise."
© Mark W. Ó Brien 2015

Clouds slowly step aside as you peek from behind the sugar maple trees, making sure your winged messengers are awake and announcing this glorious day’s arrival. Such sweet tweets from all your loyal followers. You saunter out, softly caressing my skin.  Splashing colors as you wake up the valley, magically touching every leaf, flower and blade of grass. Spiders quietly await their turn to dine on their webs as your glistening heat transforms their death traps into shimmering inviting lace.  Bees and wasps buzzing joyfully as sweet nectar draws out of the fragrant flowers you helped bloom; all of nature prepares to feast on what you have nurtured.  Everything on this planet is in need of the nourishment you provide.  Your radiance exudes health and happiness. I twirl and sway barefoot in your presence as many of God’s creations line up to perform their concertos in your honor. Every musical composition is beautifully arranged without sheets by these incredible composers.  While absorbing the beauty that you generate, a cleansing warmth showers over us as we rise in strength and stand tall while our energy permeates within until the twilight takes over. What an honor it is to spend this day with you and your band of soaring aficionados.
  

Soul boosting sunshine
Birds and insects performing
Pure Inspiration

~
© Aida I. DePascale 2017
~

Aida I. DePascale is a poet, a writer of short stories and an avid photographer of nature.  She lives in Catskill, New York.

Monday, August 14, 2017

In Sepia. by Carol H. Jewell

"Dancing gives you illusions, 
prayer makes you lose them." 
-Francis Picabia
© Mark W. Ó Brien 2015

The photographs, taken from afar, taken up close, taken from every possible angle. The tone, sepia. The farm outbuildings in the background, and beyond that, the mountain. Always that mountain. Fortress-strong. Citadel. Bastion. In rain. In snow. In wind. In dreams. Charity, like the mountain, perpetual, eternal. Metapoetry, endless thought. The pen to the page, the camera to the eye.

Told you a story
of a mountain in the mist:
man and camera.

~

© Carol H. Jewell 2017

~


Carol is a musician, teacher, librarian, and poet living in Upstate New York with her wife and eight cats. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the College of Saint Rose in 2016.

Monday, August 7, 2017

3 poems by Lorette C. Luzajic.

Just Before It Rained:
 "When The Moon Is On The Hill."
© Mark W. Ó Brien 2015

There was something in the sky that afternoon, like a pinpoint  pale sun in the swirl of clouds. I'd never seen that kind of ice chip moon in summer. The air was low and near, close to the truck, along with that strange kind of low to the ground light that gets trapped under a pending storm.
We had pulled over to figure out where we'd gone wrong. You had a map spread out over your spindly thighs, finger marking where you thought you were, but your attention was outside your window.
After a long time, you came back and told me what I already knew, but had to hear from you. There's no cure this time, you told me. That's what they told me. There was a kind of detached relief in your voice, about the news, about confessing it.   I'm done like dinner, Bobby McGee.
the sky closes in
there are no blues like these ones
the book's last pages
~

Tea Sandwiches:

"This side of the creek."
© Mark W. Ó Brien 2017

Here is the house where I used to stalk you, where I opened my eyes to watch you when our heads were bowed to pray.  Your father always welcomed me to the door, where I appeared, scrubbed and sanitized and ready to be sanctified. Your sweet Ma, always with a tray of tiny egg and mayonnaise sandwiches. Her pickles were the best in town.
Forget what it was that we buried in these hills. Or have you already? I keep coming back. You keep being gone.
the white clapboards are
painted fresh each summer by
people we don't know.
~

The Poem I Didn't Want to Write:

"Nature always wears the color of the spirit."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson 
© Mark W. Ó Brien 2015

My father is suddenly old. He has never been old. He has never been anything but strong and serene. He is every young girl child's Superman, he is the kind and patient doctor,  the Laughing Buddha, the stern and sensible life raft friend, the man whose prayers are taken seriously by other congregants, and by God.
Here, look. I have dug out of my memory box a picture of Daddy, half my age, in big plastic glasses and a stethoscope. In those days, he worked double shifts at the auto factory, but shows up still in all the pictures where I'm playing. Once for my birthday party with the girls from school, he put "four leaf clover" on a scavenger hunt list to keep us busy for hours and make sure no one would find everything. But there was some kind of mutation in the fields that year, and we found hundreds of them. He was a magician.
If my father was good luck, I was cursed, and learned to weather the worst. When I turned 20, Daddy said, "Your life has already been something out of a country and western song." Johnny Cash was warbling on a cheap cassette player in the kitchen. I was as moody and brittle as I'd ever been, and cast a hostile glare. He was not deterred. Looking straight into me, hand on my shoulder, he said, "You ain't seen nothing yet."
When I was 30 and started burying all my friends, I stood up in my room after a nightmare and thought, since my father had probably never skipped a day, there've been at least 10 950 prayers for me.
The world I know is one that careens between the sun and the pits of the hell with alarming rapidity, and I have found my ways of holding on.
But I do not know this world, this bulldozer barreling the foundation that holds my fragile balance. I do not know what it means to reach to steady myself and find my father frail and uncertain. I do not know what it means to consider a Dad that vitamins and the Lord cannot fix. I do not know whether I am coming or going. I despise the appointments and the pills and the tests and especially, his strange small smile, how it flickers like a dying lightbulb.
This is the poem I didn't ever want to write.
I remember the pink plastic jump rope and the park trail in upper state New York, the rough knit of your palm when you dragged me upright and brushed off my bruised knees. How there was nothing real except the high pitch whine of endless mosquitos.  I remember us putting a little ball of plasticine and a toothpick flag into a dozen half walnut shells we had painted bright with polka dots and stripes, and sending a fleet of little mouse boats down the river.
the bright blue green fields
are waiting for you, Dad, clouds
like cotton candy
~

Lorette C. Luzajic is the author of four collections of poetry: The Astronaut's Wife, Solace, Aspartame, and The Lords of George Street. She is editor at The Ekphrastic Review, which publishes writing inspired by visual art. Visit her at www.mixedupmedia.ca.