“Birds happen like poems happen. I love them and am always surprised to find them appearing in meaningful ways.” Dan Chelotti
Margaret Fisher Squires is a psychotherapist who has shared her poetry largely through local readings with the Hart Rock Poetry Series, the Writers Guild at Bloomington, and Five Women Poets. She is perhaps the only person to have published a poem in the Bloomingfoods Co-op newsletter. She is one of the contributors to the Five Women Poets 2016 chapbook "Birds of a Feather."
Welcome to the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey. Margaret what poems have you brought for us today?
January, 2017
Darkness is gathering
not falling like night
with its promise of rest and dawn
not clouding up like a freshening storm
but rolling down like an avalanche of coal dust
burying all before it
The horizon rumbles
as if with the pounding
of giant hooves
In the town square
people run in frightened dashes
or sink to their knees
under despair's weight
But here and there
someone stops to light
a match
a candle
a lamp
Here and there
folk pull together piles of
twigs
broken boards
tree limbs
They kindle bonfires
Spark by spark
the people weave
a net
each knot a flame
holding off the darkness
Final Judgment
When my husband reaches the Pearly Gates,
and Saint Peter opens the huge tome on his desk,
before he can even start to read
about all the people whose
furniture and boxes and crates
my husband helped to move,
and all the people that my husband drove
to meetings and doctor appointments
and safe home after late night concerts and parties,
and all the times that my husband
followed up his flares of temper
with apologies
utterly disarming
in their simplicity,
the saint will hear
the urgent thready piping
of a thousand voices
down by his feet.
He will push back his chair
(very carefully)
and bend to look under the desk.
There he will see a thousand arthropods:
Crickets and silverfish
and beetles and moths
and mayflies and June bugs
and lightning bugs
and spiders—
--hundreds of spiders,
brown and gray and spotted and striped
and smooth and hairy
and big and small.
The thousand arthropods
will tell the Saint,
“This man found us in the bathtub,
on the kitchen counter,
scurrying across the carpet,
and he covered us with a clean peanut butter jar,
and slipped an envelope under it,
very carefully so as not to break
our brittle little legs,
and he carried the jar and envelope
out the front door,
and he set it all down gently
in the dianthus that grew
in the flower box on the porch,
and he let us go.”
Saint Peter will stroke his beard
once, thoughtfully,
and then he will nod,
and straighten up,
and close the book
and smile at my husband
and say,
“Go on in.”
Fat Tuesday at Player’s Pub (02-05-08)
Outside, rain sheets down.
We’re blessed: It isn’t snow.
Inside, Mid-Western Mardi Gras.
Blues bounces through the amplifiers.
Plastic beads, purple, gold and green, shine in the bright light.
Then the lights go out,
Power cut by Mother Nature.
The party goes on.
Candles are lit.
A ragged not-quite-conga line circles the room,
Singing, “When the Saints Go Marching In,”
One verse,
A lot of times.
People wave bananas in the air.
(Bananas?)
Someone realizes:
The drum kit still works!
Rhythm takes the room.
More drums appear,
Inspiring each other into exuberant complexity.
We dance.
We chant.
We discover we are a tribe.
We are delighted with ourselves.
Fortunately, it is a long time before the electricity comes back on.
You've been listening to poetry by Margaret Fisher Squires on the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey.
