Sunday poetry: "Child Shrieking Over a Burst Balloon"

"Child Shrieking Over a Burst Balloon," a never-before-published poem that I wrote a couple of years ago, appears today in the Journal of Radical Wonder. This poem may find its way into a future collection, or it may simply be a stand-alone piece. In any case, as the title indicates, it's incredibly sad. I have never learned not to wince at the sound of a crying child.

Now is a good time to change the subject, so here are two other recent notable pieces in Radical Wonder:

The other day, a new poem by Tamara Madison -- a writer whom I have long admired, and who was once the online Poet of the Month for Moon Tide Press -- went up on the site. It's called "Give Me Your Clouds," and it reminds me of a favorite piece by D.H. Lawrence, "Craving for Spring," in which the author passionately implores the new season to arrive. Check out Lawrence's piece here, and then see if you detect a similar tone in Madison's:

Give me your clouds
Your big clouds rising like cakes in the oven
Blue clouds heavy-bottomed, looming
High clouds scratched by wind
Clouds like a sun-bleached spine
I want white clouds billowing up
with a narrow sword-gray cloud
ripping through the middle...

Also worth a read is Lavina Blossom's "Holding," which the poet describes as a response to a writing challenge in which she took vocabulary from the first and last lines of a poetry collection (Elizabeth Cantwell's Nights I Let the Tiger Get You) and worked them into an original piece. I haven't read Cantwell's book, but the poem that Blossom wove out of it is quite beautiful, and I give her full permission to use any of my books as her next raw material.