IPM 2011

Oh, boy! It’s International Poetry Month again! Check it out: bonniemcclellan.wordpress.com. I f you go to this site, you can read a different poet every day. Today’s poet is brilliant! I love her so much! Go, go, click that thang!

Here are two poems to whet your whistle:

Blizzard
Gale warning hail warning
Sky sifts high drifts
Finding bright blinding white
Snowball snowfall
Moonscape snowscape
Fostbite dost bite
Rococo swirls Hot cocoa curls
Icy glove spicy love
Huddle in cuddle in
Rock salt Clocks halt
Barbara Reiher-Meyers, copyright 2006
It Was So Cold
Paris, February 1986

The horses on the carousel refused to budge.
Notes of music froze and
shattered with prismatic finality…
The mimes couldn’t change their expressions.
When a bread truck overturned and
baguettes were suspended in mid-air
pigeons were afraid to leave their roosts for the feast.
Women in expensive fur hats could not retract icy stares.
Rats went skating on rivers of frozen dog piss.
Double busses refused to straighten out
continued running in circles indefinitely.
Terrorist bombs exploded in s l o w m o t i o n
allowing everyone to escape harm.
A fountain in the Place Edmond Rostand became
a crystal pineapple inhabited by eskimos.
A Norwegian with a pickax broke off pieces for souvenirs.
Outside Paris waterfalls retreated back into mountains.
God Himself became an irrelevant ice cream vendor
slowly scooping a ball of lemon sherbet
from horizon to painted horizon.


©1986, Whitman McGowan

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