​POETRY  -  
          With a Theme of Time 

"the memory of seeing
reverberates in widening circles"
                                   
                                  Photo by  Weebly                                

In a Room on a Courtyard in Firenze
by Dan Liberthson

A giggling of girls swirls up, floats
lightly like a cloud of gnats
into and around the room and then
is gone out the window.
 
So cruelly mortal, sweetly immortal,
this sound pulls soul from body
as a trout leaps skyward
from a murky lake.
 
An instant mastering air,
it sees, miraculous fish,
a gyre of blackbirds turn
toward welling sunset,
 
feels cool air on wet skin,
and lives, this endless moment,
the whole of life everywhere,
with no fear of pain or death.
 
Re-entering, it becomes again
one with dense, obliviating water,
yet this blindness no longer
obscures all: the memory of seeing
 
reverberates like widening ripples
of girls’ laughter, fading
yet captured in descent
by concentric circles,
 
insistent as the call
of a melted bell once flawless,
or a skeletal songbird perched
in past and future, present forever.
 
Note: This poem was previously published in the book Animal Songs (©2010, Dan Liberthson).
 

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Dan Liberthson was born in Rochester, New York and attended Northwestern University and SUNY at Buffalo (PhD, English). He has retired from a career as a medical writer, and lives in San Francisco and Cottage Grove, Oregon. He has published five books of poetry and has published individual poems in anthologies and journals, including The Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, South Coast Poetry Journal, Elysian Fields Quarterly, Chaminade Literary Review and Triggerfish. He was Secretary of the Oregon Poetry Association (2019-2022), and took second place in the William Stafford Memorial Award Poetry Contest (2020) and the Maine Poets Society Contest (2022). He also published The Bluejay Contrivance, a spy novel, and The Golden Spider, a middle-grade fantasy novel. For more information, visit liberthson.com.

Other works in this issue:
Poetry:
​Banana Slug
The Octopus Pot

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