December 2015
Poetry is a lonely business, but I have a friend who plays guitar, and when I play bass with him, I find community. My most recent book is In This Place: Selected Poems 1982-2013 and I've had recent poems in Hummingbird, Atticus Review, Hamilton Stone Review, and other literary magazines. I'm honored to serve as managing editor of the Lorine Niedecker Monograph Series, What Region?. I blog as The Middlewesterner (www.middlewesterner.com), and have put up at least five little poems a week since mid-2008.
A Turning
Light falls like new snow
on the winter evening.
Everything we know
gets called to question.
The cold brings a kind
of understanding where,
having come to terms,
death and wisdom meet.
Teach Us
As the season falls away to darkness,
as friends depart and leave us their absence,
as pain becomes the only joy we know,
as our losses turn to bitterness
and our hearts to loaves of stone,
teach us to love again, teach us to let go.
Saturday: Music
The wind like a compass,
north-northeast, where thunder
rolls in from, where I will
make some music tonight.
Heavy clouds. Broken sky.
The evening carries hope,
as hope carries one's heart
across the great darkness.
Music is what we have.
©2015 Tom Montag