December 2021
Bio Note: I resumed writing after forty odd years in foreign intelligence and international sales. There've been over three hundred stories and poems published so far, and six books. I work the other side of writing at Bewildering Stories, where I sit on the review board and manage a posse of nine review editors.
Putting it in Context
I come from a ball of mixed rubber bands, a coreless hodge-podge of colors and sizes. I come from an overstuffed knife drawer I must reach into in the dark. I come from a random-hung clothes closet, never knowing what tomorrow will have on. I come from unread and unfinished books and brag about the titles I come from mistakes and random events while declaring glorious destiny. I arise each day content to abide in the dog’s breakfast I come from. ~
Rara Avis
I never envisioned myself as old. Older, yes, slightly, better off and wiser, but with intact body and mind. Death, when imagined at all, was an idyllic transfiguration. I would not change what and who I was, nor, most often, what I did and to whom, nor even my unwitting self-hurtings. But I would whisper in my ear when it was still fringed by light brown hair “Lick the blood from the hurts done you, curl your tongue around the spit of kisses, let harsh words stab your eardrums, welcome the torn ache of stressed muscles.” But I know I wouldn’t be listening. ~
Author's Note: Rotary letterpress printing died out decades ago, but was once how large newspapers were printed. Initially individual letters were set into page sized forms called chases. a heavy paper sheet called a flong was pressed against the type to reproduce the letters and half-tone images. Eventually, hot metal type casting machines called linotypes replaced part of this process. The flong was placed, curved and vertical into a moulding box and a liquid mixture of lead, antimony and tin was poured in. The curved metal plate , called a stereo, was then placed on a printing press along with many others and voila- newspapers. If this sounds clunky, it was, and newspaper printing was eventually taken over by offset and digital methods.
The Lead Stereos
On the deck of our house
are two seventy-pound stereos,
curves opposed, print facing out.
Lead still shiny, headlines still legible
after fifty years of weathering.
The base for a glass topped table.
They are an obelisk for the
slow death of print newspapers,
and the withering away
of balanced reporting.
The profession I trained for
gone electronic and shrill.
No one misses the smudges
of lamp black and petroleum oil,
or the hassle of recycling,
and in a few more years
no one will care that
newspapers gave us the world.
There was an underpaid nobility
in reporting investigated facts
and recording marriages and deaths,
and the current, fleeting buzz
leaves us all with little sense
of permanence and place.
©2021 Ed Ahern
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to say what it is about the poem you like. Writing to the author is what builds the community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -JL