Showing posts with label barrow street. Show all posts
Showing posts with label barrow street. Show all posts
Monday, July 13, 2020
Join Susan Sonde on Zoom August 6th, 2020 at 6 pm
Join Susan Sonde on Zoom August 6th, 2020 at 6 pm
Berks Bards welcomes Susan Sonde to join us online on Zoom!
When: August 6th, 2020 at 6 pm
Where: TinyURL.com/VirtualBard
If required, please enter the Meeting ID 759 062 6042
Below is a sample prose poem from our featured poet:
FELINE PASTORAL, FELINE BLUES
My black and white tuxedo cat stares up at me. His world was once a cane, the hours took turns beating him; hung him like a slab of meat in their abattoirs. Rage cut his tongue in two. Tonight the wind retaliates. The leaves prattle on and on without surcease. Dust hurls itself at passersby. UPS delivers daily
the long insomnia-riddled nights. Clocks grow surly and the Devil leaps from a deviant’s throat. East to west, stove tops hustle, pushing kettles beyond their boiling points. The world’s gone rogue, juggles live bands and hand grenades while it wire walks. Sighs and whispers say all’s ending, yet the clouds still patrol the morning skies, yellow-gray in their gray barges.
Query the sounds a mad woman hears. Query the thoughts her mind shapes, the cries snow makes falling knife-like towards her throat.
What if the fork that nestles in a napkin’s folds ransacked the cloth in which it shelters and thinking for itself just long enough, found a heart in which to thrust itself? What if sunset called and no one came, or the sand on beaches
decried their emptiness…absence of footfall saddening them. Oh sunset your ravens worry me, your chicks are poorly loved. Deafening are the blows dealt the one who receives them. In air silence resonates, holds secrets to the stars and compound interest.
Some believe in the benefits of believing; invest heavily in the concept of an afterlife: standing room only, angels crowding about them, wings stuffed inside Hawaiian shirts; leis caged around their pale white throats.
Oh child of aging bone and fur, oblivious on your cushion. I kneel beside you…starving inmate invited to a banquet. Let’s enter our eternal rest together: ours the chair in which no one’s ever sat, ours the sea in which no protozoan ever swam. No doors lead out that don’t lead in.
No knowledge there of the weather, none of the blues. No shuteye to offer the departing.
Read the biography of Susan Sonde below:
Sunday, February 17, 2019
Join Nathanael Tagg at GoggleWorks Center for the Arts March 7th, 2019
Berks Bards is excited to welcome Nathanael Tagg! Join us at GoggleWorks Center for the Arts to hear selected poetry. Following his reading, we'll allow ANYONE to step up to the mic and read what moves them.
When: March 7th, 2019 at 6 pm
Where: GoggleWorks Center for the Arts Studio 420
201 Washington Street Reading PA 19601
Read Nathanael Tagg's Bio below:
Nathanael Tagg has an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers, where he was a Truman Capote Literary Trust fellow. He is an associate professor at Cecil College. His first book, a collection of poems entitled Animal Virtue, was published by WordTech Editions in March 2018. His writing has appeared in Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Cimarron Review, Confrontation, Pleiades, and many other magazines. It employs humor, nature imagery, poetic form, and allusions—especially the biblical or literary—to explore the challenges of living well in times of personal, spiritual, or environmental trouble. He lives with his wife and their nine-month-old daughter in Lancaster, PA.
Read a sample poem from Nathanael below:
Our Baby Deepness
Really? Yes, science proves the virgin birth
of Komodo dragons, caused by the holy spirit
of loneliness. Often, a most mammal-like lizard
—call her Mary; look in her eyes (somebody
is home)—must have swum to paradise,
an island with everything she needs, bar
a mate. Evolution—call him Evo—
couldn’t brook this (no nativity) forever
and said, “No mate? No problem. Voila:
you’re pregnant.” Science contests every miracle?
Destroys a sense of beauty and mystery? Really?
No spirituality without dualism and theology?
To awe me, Jane, yours needn’t be a virgin birth
and won’t be, which your mom and I can confirm.
To the miraculous process, I’m peripheral.
Never mind another miracle: walking on water.
Oceanographer Sylvia Earle walked the ocean floor,
wore a pressurized suit, was reborn as Our Lady
Deepness, who says, “Kids don’t start out killing;
they start out wondering.” Jane, you’ll
be curious (in both senses) like Jane Goodall
and become yourself by living among us—
among animals. Like you, like fetuses, in wetness
Earle lives, learns, grows. Mirroring the odyssey
of your mom, every woman with child, all expectant
parents (me too!), Earle, while pregnant,
descended in a submersible to explore the depths.
Learn more about Nathanael by visiting his website: http://www.nathanaeltagg.com
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