Exodus by Effie Lee Newsome Rank fennel and broom Grown wanly beside The cottage and room We once occupied, But sold for the snows! The dahoon berry weeps in blood, I know, Watched by crow-- I've seen both grow In those weird waters of Dixie! Exodus appeared in the Crisis XXIX, no. 3 (January 1925.) Effie Newsome, born January 19, 1885, in Philadelphia, was a poet from the Harlem Renaissance movement. She's the author of Gladiola Garden, Poems for Second Grade Readers, published many poems in the Crisis, and other leading journals from the Harlem Renaissance. She died in 1979.
Author: Byungafallgren
The Angel Sun
The Angel Sun
(Granddaughter once said
sun must be an angel)
This morning
from my window view
you look different,
like a little girl
hiding something
she had done wrong.
Oh, I know.
You shined on the devil
with red hand
under the dark wings,
your warmth of pureness
touching it
as you do
on the children shivering
on the rubbles of the war.
You wished you drowned in
the lake but you let your shadow did,
for you must rise again,
like all the saints do.
©Byung A. Fallgren
Climate
Climate
by Meghann Plunkett
It felt familiar, your mouth moving
up my side like gale warning. My
arm calico-mammatus clouds--
Blood brought to the surface.
Now I understand my childhood
home. Releasing shingle after shingle
into brutal air. Our front door
torn and flat in the yard. Violent
gusts whipping through the marshes--
the back of your hand.
of what I have unlearned
this was the hardest.
One sandpiper singing
still, desire does not have to leave you ruined.
Ms. Plunkett is the winner of the Missouri Reviews Jeffery
E. Smith Editors' Prize and Third Coast Poetry prize.
She works as a television writer on various Trip the Lights
and Shondaland production.
Burning
what has no good eyes
nor has ears?
a dictator who is and a thing else
it dulls his sense of discerning
right from wrong
hot vain dream
what will he do
now all alone?
turn to a cat and yowl?
Beauty of human nature blooms in the ashes
thunder spirit-storm bellows
above the flame
burning forest of the cities
March snow piles
on the rubbles and ashes
cawing lone crow
©Byung A. Fallgren
Morning Sun and the Lake
Morning sun and the Lake they whisper to each other every morning of their tears all night long ©Byung A. Fallgren This was published in The Weekly Avocet #465, 10-31-2021.
The Delusional Old man
The Delusional Old man He's been eyeing on the family compound hillside, prying on the nightly feud. He grows greed to own the place. Only if he can coax the landowner to abandon it. Fool's dream. He sprayed the fire-seeds over the compound to scare the landowner, flee the homestead, burning the house and all, leaving the children and elders shiver in the cold. The villagers rescue the landowner with the food and warm clothes and build a shelter on the lot, rebuke the old man for what he has done. I only tried to stop the family feud, says the old man. What should the villagers do with the old man? Take him to a mental hospital, says the boy. You are my smart Ukraine boy. Grandma hugs him tight. But, the boy continues, you didn't tell me why we are here in the train subway in this cold night. And why do they bomb outside? I just told you, son. ©Byung A. Fallgren
Face masks not for others
Face Masks Not for others and Pink Lilac are accepted
by The Avocet, a Journal of Nature Poetry. They will
be published in the printed issue Spring 2022, The Avocet,
a Journal of Nature Poetry. Thank you, Charles, Vivi, and
Valerie for taking the pieces.
The Weekly Avocet
The Weekly Avocet–#482 is here. (This last for a week.)
My work “Wyoming Wind” appears in this issue.
Winter Haiku/senryu
little bird and the budding leaves listen to each other urgent message from Nature the whistling windows in the wee hour lone buck in the moonlight war invasion never a humanitarian purpose crying children in hunger and cold ©Byung A. Fallgren
Byung A. Fallgren 