Saturday, March 5, 2011

Mike Kocinski: Featured Poet (newly appointed Poetry Editer)

Michael Kocinski is the featured poet of this issue...we are good friends and have collaborated on many projects...even playing music on stage (him on harmonica)....so it just seemed fitting to ask him to work on this magazine with me. this poem is grackles by michael kocinski.

Grackles 
for Bob Philips 

I think they must all have been 
heavy equipment operators or 
veteran farmers in their past lives. 
It's the way they walk, 

I imagine their lunch-pail swagger, 
the irridescent grease and oil stains 
on thick cotton work blues, 
the metallic sheen of daily blue jeans. 

They rolled when they walked 
back then, too, favoring distressed 
joints and muscles wracked by use. 
Still, their eyes did glint and shine 

with avian brightness under buzzing 
fluorescent tubes and sunlight hung 
by chains from ceiling or sky. 

Now they wander lawns, heads cocked, 
purple tongues in the garden lapping up 
windfall mulberries, glittering insects, 
seeds, even bits of stone and metal, 

singing their guttural odes in choruses. 
No human memory troubles their minds, 
you can see it in their eyes, round and 
bright as rivets in a pair of bib overalls. 

1 comment:

  1. I love this poem. I feel very close to it. This is a poem that reaches out to embrace the reader in a hug.

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