[Gail White]

On behalf of A. E. Stallings, here is an early poem of hers that appeared in Light:

SECRETARIES' DAY

Rejoice! The copier is jammed!
Pour toner down the sink!
Originality, long damned,
Recovers from the brink.

Let us take no messages
Or prisoners. Be bold!
Delete important passages!
Put all the phones on hold!

Sing out! The hard drives all have crashed,
We'll process no more words!
We'll leave them raw and freely gashed,
And feed them to the birds!

Alas. The copier's repaired,
The hard drive's up. Be brave:
We'll beg so that our jobs are spared.
We'll promise to behave.

The sun is out. The sky is teal --
Yet there are "if'S" and "but's"
(And other wounds as slow to heal
And thin as paper cuts).

[Esther Murer]

Orientation Speech

A compass
is an object about which it is not worth making a rumpus.
This wretched hunk of magnetite
can't even tell me which is my left hand and which is my right.
The location of north and south is a mystery which I have not the least interest in plumbing;
what I want to know is whether I'm going or coming.
Be so kind as to spare us
your lecture on the virtues of knowing the whereabouts of Polaris.
The wind bloweth where it listeth,
or so the Bible insisteth;
and what direction it bloweth from engageth me as little as how to tell splakes from wrasses.
Just give me a gadget that will point to where I put my glasses.

[Thomas Gorman]

Hello everyone. First off I want to say thanks to Michael Cantor for starting this thread. Gail White let me know about it, and I thank her too.

My contributions to the magazine are more typesetting, layout and art, but that was all just window dressing for the authors who sent work in that was published.

John's departure was unexpected and a shock to us all. As to the future of Light, I cannot speak to that right now and this is not the proper venue anyway.

I will always be grateful to John, where ever he is, for the opportunity to interact with so many of you. John had a talent for selecting light verse, and I could see that as I laid out each issue.

Thank you all for your work, and thoughts.

Regards,

Thomas Gorman
Ops guy for Light Quarterly

[David Nelson Bradsher]

I was introduced to John, via Email, by Tim Murphy, who kindly recommended this poem for publication. It was my first appearance in LQ. Thanks, Tim, for the intro, and thank you, John, for your kind acceptance.

A Study in Rodin

She strolled with grace—a goddess in a fur—
holding a handbag and a champagne flute.
My Ego nudged my Id, said, “Look at her!”
so I proceeded, in my warm-up suit,
to turn my sneakers on the slick parquet
and sidle up to the Rodin display.
The Thinker brooded there, a studied pose
of Man’s reflective mood (without his clothes).

She stood, absorbed in art, admiring him,
his bundled muscles bronzed and set in state.
I touched my baseball cap, then tipped the brim,
flashed a grin, and asked, “Could this be fate?”
The sleek Parisian smirked and, with a scoff,
she shook her head, mouthed “Non”, and sashayed off.
I watched her, slumped to sit, and cocked my wrist,
and pondered the rejection, chin to fist.

[Roger Slater]

I wrote this for my son a month or two before he was born. (Another poem I wrote for his second birthday appeared in LQ quite recently).


HOW WE PICKED YOUR NAME
for Lincoln

They told him Grant was filthy drunk.
"Then find out what he's drinkin',
and make the other generals
drink some, too," said Lincoln.

He wrote the Gettysburg Address,
transformed the lowly ink in
his pen to soaring flights of prose!
And so we named you Lincoln.

A moral man, profound and brave,
compassionate and thinkin',
he nullified the title 'slave'.
What better name than Lincoln?

You may not understand just yet,
but someday it will sink in:
of all the names a boy can get,
there's none surpasses Lincoln.

[Alex Pepple]

Thank for stopping by, Thomas, and for all you've been doing for Light . . . and, good thread, Michael.

A Morning Alarmed Quarrel

You’re a jezebel that annoys
deep sleep
with your decibels of beep noise!

[Susan McLean]

This was one of the first poems I ever had accepted by Light.

Susan


Picky Eater

Higgledy-piggledy,
Titus Andronicus
said to Queen Tamora
“Stop being rude.

Dinner guests shouldn’t be
overparticular.
Plus, you have already
played with your food.”

[Michael F]

Fittingly, a fun thread --

I was late to the party, but Light was, I think, my second acceptance – SCR and “Those Hills” was my first.

This ditty is due out from Light any day now… I corrected the proofs in December. (I hope this isn’t “bad form”.)


The Creed of the Weed, or
Must We Cultivate our Garden?

No one feels a need
to praise the common weed.
It’s commonness, indeed,
that makes something a weed.
We defend our manicured Zion
from hordes of dandelion;
the barbarous Huns of thistle
get mace and our righteous dismissal.
The weed, it does not care.
It too must grow somewhere.
Its resolve seems but to harden
at the ramparts of the garden.

It is as if the weed
confessed another creed
and believed itself as just
as crusading gardeners must.
The weed would seem to say:
“Let Nature have her way;
the spheres, their perfect movements
aren’t helped by man’s improvements.”
It sounds familiar – why, it’s
like the weed was reading Leibnitz.

But, dissatisfied to a man,
we try to force Nature’s hand:
we raze the hill, divert the rill,
to carve our will in the grudging till;
we cast out native flora
for cultures we’d like more of --
after the apple, we swear
on the bible of Voltaire.

[Janice D. Soderling]

This is a marvelous thread. A wonderful showcase of Eratosphere talent and a tribute to editorial acumen.

[Maryann Corbett]

What Janice said. Much enjoyed.