Friday, March 30, 2012

A Special Anouncement and Poem of the Week

Overcome with modesty, I've decided to run one of my poems (about spring) this week as the Biscuit City Poem of the Week.  Congratulations to me for being chosen. By me. Well, enough of that!

I also want to announce that Biscuit City will be taking next week off for Spring Break. The Biscuit City staff will be spending the time together at the Biscuit City Condo Complex just outside Biscuit City, Florida, located on the Gulf Coast. If you're in the area, drop in and meet some of the folks who seem to exist only on paper, on the airwaves or in a world of fantasy. If they're not golfing, you might have a chance to rub elbows with Biscuit City Chief of Staff Molly Bolt or her counterpart, Harrison Bergeron of MB & HB Enterprises, which is a proud sponsor of the "Extra Gravy" segment of the Biscuit City Network . Or join us for happy hour overlooking the beach and sunset every evening on the Grand Verandah.  Cash bar, please and formal attire required.

Biscuit City will return April 9 at its usual location. Until then, be safe, be well and call when you get there.

Now to the Poem of the Week:
 
Three Songs for an Early Spring

i

Four cycle engines that once roamed the great grasslands
Migrated north last fall, herding  leaves ,
Singing high pitched leaf herding songs.

In the frozen north, they animated snow machines
Flying over the packed accumulation
Leaving a few behind to clear snow
In the mid-Atlantic.

Toward early spring they moved south in vast herds
Churning through flat grasslands
Arriving at last at the place they left from
Roaring their triumph over the leaves of grass
Sounding their  barbaric yawp over the earth.

They  would have made Whitman proud
Were he not sleeping under the grass himself.

ii

Today the great white yard waste trucks growled and snorted
Distantly all through the morning and afternoon hours
Their handlers gathering sticks and branches and leaves and grass
Offered by residents as tribute to the new season.

The truck in turn pulled to the curb in front of my house
And took all my yard waste.

I felt gratitude and relief that my offering had been accepted
By the great white behemoth.

Like Moby Dick, these monsters of the street
Live in our dreams, haunt our nightmares, fuel our obsessions,
Are the color of ambiguity, the color of purity,
The color of cleanliness,  the color of
Death.

 No one gets out of this life
Alive.

iii

My mother said that as a gardener I made a pretty good reader.
And so I said that sounded good and went inside to practice my
Reading
While she taught plants to thrive.

Now I am a writer of sorts
Inside most of the time

But today I’m outside
Sowing ideas
Editing flower beds
Revising shrubbery structures
Punching up piles of leaves
Readying all for a spring publication of thought and whimsey
And maybe even a plant or two.

Dan Verner

2 comments:

  1. Dan, I told you before how I feel about that last stanza, but when I see the three put together, I just grin and love it! The word play with literary references? PRICELESS.

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  2. Thank you! It was fun to write!

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