Sample Poetry
The poems below were chosen as “Best Poems” and excerpted from the two most recent issues of the Aurorean. Poems were selected by independent judges. Rights remain with authors.Lux Perpetua
With little regard for literary merit,
My father read incessantly.
That picture I’ve kept shows him
Almost obscured by the shade of a forest,
Yet visible, if you look, his features serene, concentrated
On his reading—whatever it was, he took it seriously—
His life muted like the light in the photo
And him happy in that life, thank God—speaking of Whom,
My father missed a half-century of church,
Never thinking he had to explain why,
But never missed a day of work,
Nor could he have thought how profoundly he fashioned me
As if with one hand, while he kept on reading,
Fashioned so that when I study him in his shade,
Which fooled my eyes for nearly my lifetime,
I see something he may never have known himself,
Something greater than his habitual kindness.
I mean that light that shone in his face,
Hiding itself under that tall, brimming short man’s hat
Which every blessed morning he wore to work.
by Michael Cavanagh, from the Fall/Winter 2009-2010 Aurorean
by Michael Cavanagh, from the Fall/Winter 2009-2010 Aurorean
* * *
Beach Glass
(for Anne Cowles Pinkney)We could be the neck of a milk bottle
or a bit of bobeche from a grand chandelier.
It doesn’t matter what we were a part of
before we were broken, only that we were
broken and a part of something
and that our young edges were sharply fragile
and our translucence too common.
We know of waves, and still, now and then
feel them vacuum the sand from beneath our feet
and pull us out and over and back, across the sand
as if we were something’s great hobby
tumbling in finer and finer and finer grit.
And it is the tumbling that matters
so much more than the approval
of combers or children, for if we have time
the tumbling will give us a texture
that transcends the standards
by which we are judged.
We remember so little
of how the tumbling smoothed us
only that, in the end, we are smooth.
by Jeff Roberts, from the Spring/Summer 2009 Aurorean
