October is an exciting month

Winds blow in, frontal waves wash in and out, skies dramatically darken. Then the next day, or the next hour, a silent sky twirls beneath a clear blue bowl, an umbrella of light, in which we see straight to the empty marvel of forever. It’s a miracle, it’s magic. It’s a turn in a cosmic circle game against which we may seek to drag our feet, yet the wheel of the seasons rolls along, large as life, endless as time. The great express train of the cosmos roaring into the station.

All aboard for October!

It’s also a good month, as Dick Allen’s poem “Hornet’s Nest” in the October Verse-Virtual remind us, to kill wasps. Here’s what I’m up to.

A poem of mine (“You Had To Be There”) appeared on Oct. 5 in an attractive presentation in The Somerville Times, an independent newspaper in the greater Boston area. My thanks to Doug Holder, who edits the paper’s “Lyrical Somerville” column. The link is:

http://www.thesomervilletimes.com/archives/70860#more-70860

Three of my poems appear in October 2016 issue of Verse-Virtual.com, the online poetry journal that publishes a new edition every month. This issues publishes scores of poems by 72 poets, including three of mine, plus a column on writing poetry by David Graham this month titled “The Tygers of Wrath.” The phrase is taken from a line in one of William Blake’s attack-on-conventional-wisdom poems called “The Proverbs of Hell.”         I don’t summon those tigers in any of my own poems this month, but the last of them does have a touch of snark. The poem’s title, “What Color is the Sky in Your World?” is a phrase I drew from somebody’s smug Facebook comment on an idealistic post. I thinks we need to expand our notions of the possible, not cling to a same-old, same-old of ever diminishing expectations.

The poem begins:

“Funny you should ask.
But did you mean today,
this monochrome afternoon
when neither the shape of cloud nor light can distinguish itself
from the dull metal of rusting hills?
Or some other day when the blue of
an ancient warrior’s helmet, glimpsed
in the museum of hereafter
sits on an ocean
from rim to rim the hue of imagination?”

… For the rest of this poem (and to find your way to all the others) see http://www.verse-virtual.com/robert-knox-2016-october.html