A Labor Day Treat!
It is my great pleasure to introduce you to friend and creative colleague, B.E. Stock, who I have known for many years. I first met B.E.Stock at the Old Stone House in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where we both read our works at a reading for Brooklyn poets. There, I purchased her book, Collected Poems, which I have enjoyed ever since.
B.E. Stock studied poetry and fiction writing at Bread Loaf,
Sarah Lawrence College, the Brooklyn Poetry Circle with Alfred Dorn, The West
Chester Form and Narrative Conference, and Colrain. She is widely published in
magazines and websites such as Blue Unicorn. Orbis, The Lyric, Poetry Porch, Lalitamba,
Utmost Christian Writers, and Catholic World, and has curated and featured in
poetry readings in Manhattan and Brooklyn, New York. B. E. Stock has self-published at various
times since 1976, and her book and chapbooks are available. Please e-mail bestock@nyc.rr.com for details.
Two poems by B.E.Stock are below.
I will feature two more tomorrow.
T.S.
THE OTHER BRANCH
We heard in the night the winds of unprecedented hate
Howl through our continent, and, packing our hearts
With a few keepsakes, fled to another.
And during our struggle with indifference and greed,
Our cousins, lovers of hearth and home, who would not
believe us,
Were slaughtered, dissected, driven to death in toil,
Cut away from sons and mothers, burned
In enormous furnaces, trucked into troughs of death.
And you ask, why have we become so hard,
Our faces etched with determination,
Our skin pale from endless ascetical rules?
Or else, sprawling in generous sarcasm,
Why do we spear the gentle pieties
You live by, pouring venom on your dreams?
Ours are dead, we left them behind,
And live now under a hot searchlight,
Rooting out denial, especially the kind
That enchanted us in what we thought was home.
DESTINY
I stood among the rock
Round, ugly and gray.
The day itself was gray.
The pines were full of rooks
Who screamed like burning souls.
But in my trembling hands
A heavy hammer lay,
And from the whole expanse
One ugly round I chose,
And smashed without delay.
Then, blinded by green light,
I knelt to pick up gems
Cradled there out of sight
For eons, until then.
