Ah, timing. And, rhyming. When a new prompt for a sonnet showed up at The American Scholar, I was ready. The theme? Resolutions or Regrets. It warms my heart that an experience of personal loss settled into a poem that David Lehman saw fit to share in his column "Next Line, Please." Praise the art form (three quatrains and a couplet, abab/cdcd/efef/gg)! Your call on whether my poem rhymes...
https://theamericanscholar.org/a-photographer-in-words/
Rely on Rumi, 13th century Persian poet, for our times:
Man, man, man,
what kind of lightning are you, setting farms on fire?What kind of cloud are you, raining down stones?
What kind of hunter?Caught in your own trap—a thief stealing from your own house.You’re sixty years old, you’re seventy years old,and you’re still uncooked?Still won’t let Love’s flames near,won’t let them burn you up?Enthralled by stuff and status,the crown, the turban, the king’s beard—thorns pricking your hands,but where is your flower?
Gazing in the mirror,you tilt your hat like a crescent moon—but where is your light?
Poem translated by Haleh Liza Gafori and kindly shared by Pádraig Ó Tuama.
This may not be a book of poetry, but it is the first book in my repertoire, newly revised with the addition of a third co-author. If you are an accompanying spouse (or you know someone who is), this is the handbook to have. And, this time around, while redoing some writing, a new poem was born. That poem, "121 Heatherdown Lane," is included in Inheritance of Flowers. Endeavors do cross-pollinate!
A Portable Identity, released January 5 this year, is ready for you. For a few months, some bonuses are offered from our lead page (a-portable-identity lead page). Soon, soon, one of these bonuses will be a reading of the poem that gives voice to leaving my home country.
Warm wishes,Charise
two deer rest on ice
fur warming frigid site/sight
what fresh peace is this?
~CMH
 |
| One of the deer in my backyard |
(Note: last line takes after Dorothy Parker's "what fresh hell is this?")
Lost Painting
So many geese in the graveyard
roving among white rows
of uniform headstones blurring by
on a Colorado road trip...
shifting gears in Albany’s cemetery,
choice site for learning how to
drive a stick shift with my father:
stop, start, stall over quiet knolls...
we meet a painter in Zermatt,
his easel set in a path beside plots
planted with flowers, each grave
its own garden in a town banning cars;
final stroke and the painting is ours,
gifted to me at thirteen... forgive
its fumbling pass from place to place;
the art of traveling is what holds fast.
~Charise M. Hoge
Para mi papá, March 1929-January 2026
Leda
Is it consensual,
swan swooning
over the lady...
rushing her body
as she bathes?
He, a god, uses
trickery three times.
Once, to don the swan,
then to take her down,
last, to drop the act.
All those feathers
she’ll feel forever.
~CMH
