August 2020
Bio Note: I am a longtime editor, slowly publishing poet, and author of six picture books, including
From Apple Trees to Cider, Please! and The Boy Who Said Nonsense (Albert Whitman & Company). In 2018
I moved away from the masthead of an academic quarterly to work with people who want to share their stories, ideas,
and poems in print. It’s been a joy—and quite an adventure.
Castles
By mid-August, when
you’ve had enough humidity
to sink, cicadas chorus
out the hours in dull yet dogged
drones: It’s time to turn
the mind toward school, the daily slate—
those things that bring you back,
not-unhappy Sisyphus,
beyond the pail of sand
you’ve toted to and fro all season.
Each surge of surf that sweeps
your summer castles clean away
builds such dreams
on briny foam and tiny grains
of quartz, feldspar, and mica.
Shimmering, those tumbling waves!
The dune-brown bluff September
hours are made of sterner stuff.
Wakefulness
O God of Nevertheless, it’s three nineteen.
I lay here musing to the monkish drone
of crickets coming through my August window
while my husband’s conquering snore is leveling
forests, and not unlike the gibbous moon,
before the fullness of another day
I rise to glow through gloom of shadow—all
to seek the perfect space for slipping prayers
into a poem.
©2020 Felicia Sanzari Chernesky
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the
author (email address above) to tell her or him. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is what builds the community at Verse Virtual.
It is very important. -JL