By Beverly M. Collins
Naked Helium
Someday, opinions held privately in the mind
will float like balloons to be seen boldly by
all as a banner of naked helium,
Then fall like prayers dripped into the dark
of a damp drain where they will blanket themselves
in shadow. The ground under our steps knows
Its importance even as we trample. It bounces
back but remembers the feet that pressed it.
For someday, what is underneath will be all
there is in the forefront.
The open, flat or unoccupied will be searched for
and fought over. Clean will be counted as a past
notion studied at university as part of lost history.
Movement will be demanded to marry itself
to some kind of calling or be banished.
The branded push to rule as the unmarked
become listed as criminals, their voices left to
shout at locked keyholes deep within a hidden
desert.
Rural Memories
Something about ruralism. The sandy paths into
The deep wooded areas. Patient large spiders
In the wood-wide-web of tangled trees.
Discovery of a dead dog with bones exposed
and fur surrounding its dried body like nature’s
marking tape. We fought our way back to the ditch-
sided roadway,
The sound of our footsteps so forlorn on the
quiet walk back to grandfather’s house. Only
to find him still seated, cross-legged, same look
as we left him. The less traffic, the more silent
the lonely.
With his old pipe in one hand, slowly shaking one
foot, he watched the cornfields, as if waiting
for something promised, unknown to us,
but coming on daybreak, birdwings or the winds. Then
with his conclusions drawn, stiff as the old linoleum,
maybe his departure was the signal of its arrival.
About Beverly M. Collins:
Collins is the author of Quiet Observations: Diary Thought, Whimsy and Rhyme and Mud in Magic. Her works appear in California Quarterly, Poetry Speaks! A Year of Great Poems and Poets (Sourcebooks Inc.), The Hidden and the Divine Female Voices in Ireland, The Journal of Modern Poetry (Chicago), Spectrum, Peeking Cat Literary (London), Altadena Poetry Review, The Galway Review (Ireland), Verse of Silence (India), Merak Magazine (London), Scarlet Leaf Review (Canada), Wild Word Magazine (Berlin), The Readers and Writers Magazine (UK), Truth Serum Press/Bequem Publishing (Australia), Poetry for Ukraine (UK) and others.
She is one of 3 winners of the Wilda Morris June 2021 Poetry Challenge (Chicago), a 2019 Naji Naaman Literary Prize for Creativity (Lebanon). Collins is also a prize-winner for the California State Poetry Society, twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize and short-listed for the Pangolin Review Poetry Prize (Mauritius). Her photography can be found on the cover of Peeking Cat 40, displayed online by The Academy of the Heart and Mind, printed on Fine Art America products, iStock/Getty Images, Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, Spectrum, Wend Poetry, Harpy Hybrid Review and others. Website: https://beverlym-collins.pixels.com Contact: www.facebook.com/beverlymcollinsnow
Email: clearandtrue@aol.com