Spark your creativity, make connections, and share the gift of poetry! Bloomfield Public Library offers readings by notable poets and a warm, supportive atmosphere for sharing your own work. Everyone is welcome!
The Wintonbury Poetry Series is held on the third Thursday of the month, October – April, at 7:00 PM. Open mic follows each program. BPL also hosts two poetry workshops in May. If you are interested in participating in a local author or poetry event, please fill out the Local Author Interest Form.
Residents of Bloomfield and surrounding communities are invited to submit your poetry for consideration to appear on the library’s Poetry Sharing Page. Contact Allison Wilkos at awilkos@libraryconnection.info with your submission.
A WAR AND HER LEAVINGS
Heart broken, We no longer cling, no longer cry, no longer dream, and can hardly remember our before.. children with their hollow eyes simply gaze out at nothingness..blinking statues like figures left behind..but can a statue, or a death notice or an empty belly really describe the slow insidious loss of every part.. every emotion..every bit of every morsel of us.. my maternal destroyed, their nurture once beautifully alive and now as if disappeared down a dark well..and even the reflection looks horrifying. Our purposeless living surrounded by filth and We ourselves are in a way filth and decay now..but love still lives within our nuclei and it is there that our sorrow for each other means we still exist. This we know but it is deep within and the effort to even speak through dry and brittle parched throats produces mere rasps..These loving rasps arrive inaudible and end up in my tattered blood stained handkerchief..I sit looking down at my little square of soiled cloth, my hands folding and unfolding as I beg the universe to let me feel something.
by Joe Hall
Library reopens, an ode
Walking into a new space,
Open in anticipation:
Of people returning
Of books being held
By new hands
Young and old.
New shelves gleaming in anticipation of holding
More books of new titles
And also old favorites
With new chairs waiting
To hold eager readers
With hungry minds.
Libraries are powerfully
Quiet with that nascent energy
Of that raw power of knowledge
Held between covers of a book
Waiting to be opened:
Portals to the adventures
Of imagination and information
How can anything that
Has so much vastness
Of contained possibility
Ever be considered
A quiet space when
There is such a richness
Of a rocket launch of reality
Pull a book from a shelf:
It is a recipe for a mind feast
With roads of thought
Leading to places
That are beyond experience
To become a wider, deeper now.
So there is that almost
Siren call from all those
Quiet tomes that sit
And wait, shelved until
Held in new hands
Looked at by new eyes
To experience wonder.
by Michael S. Feinberg
A sacred place
It was a fall day
A moment before
Tree color bloom,
Summer heat gone,
Winter cold near
The rock climb took
Careful foot placing
When one could move
Without thought,
Muscle memory moves.
Each step left the city,
Trees smaller, fewer,
Clean, cool air intake,
Above a hawk glided
Progress was time.
Finally, a view beyond
Trail, other ridges, trees.
Felt kindred to the hawk
With vision as the flight
Continued on.
Descending over a ridge
Gradually into electric
phosphorescent green
Trees taller than
The scrub above.
A quiet place for
The mind to carry
that somehow is
Always welcome
In a timeless space.
by Michael S. Feinberg
A Little Light
Sunbeams and moonbeams
Illuminate different parts
Of the soul –
The hot and the cool.
Is it the same landscape
We see or is it
The landscape transformed?
Spirit walk beyond sight
To resonate with a heart beat.
by Michael S. Feinberg
BOOK BANNING?
A Villanelle by Sharon Scull
Banning books is a disgrace
Growing movement, though not new
This insult smacks me in the face
How sad, this ban we did embrace
List keeps growing, now a queue
Banning books is a disgrace
All forms of bigotry do we replace?
Oppression, LGBTQ?
This insult smacks me in the face
Frightening campaign, bereft of grace
History ignored? The facts, no clue?
Banning books is a disgrace
Should not truth be in place?
Parents fear guilt will accrue
This insult smacks me in the face
Favorites emptying from bookcase
Appears to have an air of coup
Banning books is a disgrace
This insult smacks me in the face
SHIFTING YET SOLID
Dry grains of sand are swept along the slightly moist beach,
a reminder that what is light is easiest to move.
These tidbits of earthly essence are but a tiny swirl ln the
revolving continuum we know as our planet.
Each sweeping gesture is like one human life,
a definite yet fleeting impression of humanity’s
and Nature’s ever-shifting but firm foundation.
by John P. Kneal
Walking in Winter Wind
The wind came like a red-tailed hawk,
Dispatched collecting lethal fee.
Quashing any chance for talk,
Unleashed to act sadistically.
Wind’s depth and vastness scalded cure
Wind stretched out time to make thought wince;
It mocked the thought I could endure.
And left in tatters hope’s vague hints.
Wind’s disproportionate blind rage
Imposed a chilled eternity;
Each snow slowed step, wind built a cage,
To use abuse effusively.
Throughout it all, heroically,
My dog companioned stoically.
by Kim Hunt
COMING TOGETHER
That airport landing I will many times recall,
not for meeting my friend who toured Europe for the eighth time
but for the words I heard and my mind was slow to process.
The woman near me proclaimed she was connecting
with a full-blooded sister she had never met,
over sixty years of conception, deception, and separation,
victims of parental lies, secrets, fears, and guilt
with more twists and turns than a mammoth roller coaster.
A cousin, probing ancestry like a bee hunting for nectar’s cache,
dodged their blood brother’s cease and desist warning
and connected the dots that shaped this union.
One sister, flanked by curious but caring strangers,
approaches us, a group nearly surrounding her nervous look-alike.
Smart phone videos run and photos in machine-gun fashion click,
tension and relief melded into a human welcome mat.
The sisters lurch ahead and cling, years lost squeezed into seconds,
while applause erupts richer than bubbling champagne,
joy’s tears the universal link,
the landing nailed, epiphany rising—
by John P. Kneal
The Flower Fades
“The grass withers, the flower fades,
when the breath of the Lord blows upon it;
surely the people is grass.”
Isaiah 40:7 RSV
When I was young,
my father splashed
Yardley of London, English Lavender
on his face
every morning after he shaved—
fragrant, healing lotion.
This morning, so many years later,
I stepped into the shower
with a new cake of soap,
Yardley of London, English Lavender,
redolent of gardens in bloom.
“Yardley” was sharply etched
into the surface of that soap,
But I know that, with a second shower and more
the name will fade and disappear.
The cake of soap won’t seem to shrink
but after a time I will look at it
and notice how small it has become.
Finally, after weeks of use,
it will be a thin chip
ready to break if thrust against the body too hastily.
How did it get so small without my noticing it?
Day by day, shower by shower, year by year
the cake of soap wears away until
its brittle remainder,
a poor reminder of its fat beginnings,
is ready to be thrown away.
by Richard N. Pierce
Father’s Painted Butterflies
(Elmer Tarwood 1915-2003)
Twirl, glint, suspend free
of time and gravity
five pairs of wings spin wildly
darting in and out, gold-flecked bodies alive with silver-
wire antennae strung off balsa sticks
in three levels
reincarnated in a float dance
from a machinist’s fancy
strung on fishing line and breath
born of a retiree’s craft, hanging unmoved
now like dead insects. I nudge them, send them
whirling erratic again, a circular chase
click-revolve veering, sometimes clinking
mute chimes. Cold, fragile blue
yellow-gold monarchs
gliding over, under,
around each other, glance-a-chance, click-a-miss,
no win, dreams
of the maker and the watcher
lost
with the dust on their wings
merely basement
dust
by Marilyn Johnston