Echo Monthly
Reviewing the Works of Poets, each month, 
with extracts from the best moments..

                       *A Bowl of Cereal*

                   I'll have a bowl of cereal
                   And to help make up my mind
                   Of just which type of cereal
                   We've only stocked one kind
 

said Carl Corey in his one outburst of the month. If cereal were poetry however, and this echo were a pantry, the very opposite would have to be said, for the variety of poetry, in intensity and style, has been bewildering and exhuberant. Just the thing to make my poetaster's heart rhapsodize.

The May Review threatens to be huge, because the month was full of life, variety and interest. Ten poets posting, not to mention the feedback, kick backs, epigrams, witticsms and flying puns. Beside the poems of the month are several outstanding works and nearly everything that went up had some moment of merit, something to arrest my attention.

The poem of the month is by Terry Bowden: Paternity.
Along side that

       Noel Fuller's prose poem about inner silence
       Ewan Elliot's Whipping Post, and Ravens
       Bob King's Rainbow

stand out - but barely - above the rest. The echo has been a great place to be. We'll start this time with those who posted little. Little and good, as someone used to say (grin).

TERRY BOWDEN:
           'Paternity' was so good, that the only possible response was itself an attempt at poetry.

        This love is unsafe
        such that it flies
        full in the face
        of an open coffin's guest
        whose friends in cold distress
        had enwrapped to the teeth
        of a shallow sheath

Thus, succinctly the whole range of parental trap and need assails the reader, with all the subtle uncertainties, feelings of misdirection, vital and mortal dilemma that lives in 'the real thing', parenthood in root and raw.

        This love that brooks
        no breaking shores,
        nor broody cliffs
        nor bounds of play
        this overreaching
        time foresaking
        blood rich passion

        This love that ranks
        the Iliad, Odyssiad,
        Aeneid, but a weekend jaunt
        that makes of eternity
        but a transitory

        This love with more
        than the power to burst
        a billion burgeoning buds
        into premature blossom
        from one whose merest
        thought ingrains creation

towering, cliff hanging verse and telling lines.

        Such is the love of
        this father for his son.

and so was kindled the power and the pain of the major work of the month.

At almost the opposite extreme, PORCELINA posted 'A little limerick'

       There once was a man named Bry
       Who was a really sweet guy
       With a smile and a grin
       Stole my heart from within
       And I never want to say goodbye

sweet, uncomplicated, straightforward. Such are emotions, and therefore the polarities of poetry. One extreme to another:  the simple with hidden depths, (stole my heart from within ? there's an insight worthy of a sage - ) The complexities of depth laid bare.
      Let this contrast stand proof of my assertion, that the range and variety of this echo are riches indeed.

KATE MADDOCK:
     Here's a big welcome to Kate ! Who - after a lot of encouragement from Ewan posted her wonderful 'Stranger in the Night'.

       Striding thru the emotional haze
       When darkness fell late in the night
       He came bringing strength unknown
       Showing me lust and passion at it's height

The poem itself is a telling analysis of that emotional haze through which the 'stranger' strides.

       My hero in the mist
       With wings on which to soar
       A dark night - chariots of fire
       Leaving me crying, screaming, begging for more

       I clung to him for as long as I could
       Not wanting the sun to rise
       Wishing for the eternal darkness
       For the night time to remain our disguise

       Then the dawn broke
       The sun rising on a new day
       Oh how I wished for the night before
       To leave nothing unsaid..and nothing to pay.

Nicely, nicely finished, Kate. That line lingers on the tongue and in the reflective mind. I like the mythic quality of the description, mist and fire, wings and painful ecstasy, the fragmented agony of wanting, somehow, to express every nuance, to record every detail of the experience.. and the thought of payback lingering in one's thoughts.