A globe of Baccarat glass
on a sheet her hand had half-filled,
then stopped where she reached an impasse
when her heart had foundered then killed
the line she had yet to indite
and the thought her mind had distilled,
held a dogwood bloom and a bee
as if caught in mid-flight
inches away from the bloom,
and the poem she intended to write.
Summons
Sunflowers, tonsured holy-Joes,
once fat-faced with seed, now broken
backed and winter-shorn, no more
turn and track the sun but sleeved with ice,
coruscate of a sudden church-belled air,
as if the hills were clapper-struck,
welling sky with tolling bells though
I don’t know of what the tolling tells.
Edison Jennings is a Head Start school bus driver and school aide in
the southern Appalachian region of Virginia. His poetry has appeared in
a variety of journals and anthologies, including Innisfree. Broadstone Books will publish
his first full-length collection, Intentional Fallacies, later this
year.
