Steam Sealed
A full year and still we waited for hot spots
to lose their heat and for the swell to lose its curve.
We ducked from the microscopic hunter.
From no-where into every corner it swept. The
non-celebration, anti-fireworks, tiny-spiked-ghost-posse;
showed the big men who was boss as it whipped
without canon-fire, threatened and meant every
intention.
Under the pressure, mankind fell back on what is
always within reach; The Avenue-of-imagination.
We watched as our backs grew wider wings.
For we knew, there would be a new seating arrangement
when the smoke cleared, a new landscape when the
shaking ceased…So…
We kept moving around bends that felt like circles.
Kept going as we hoped for rest, not here… maybe there.
They said, “Keep Going…it’s coming…Further still.”
Beverly M. Collins: Author of the books, Quiet Observations: Diary thought, Whimsy and Rhyme and Mud in Magic. Her works appear in California Quarterly, Poetry Speaks! A year of Great Poems and Poets, The Hidden and the Divine Female Voices in Ireland, The Journal of Modern Poetry (Chicago), Spectrum, Peeking Cat Literary (London) Altadena Poetry Review, The Galway Review (Ireland), Verse of Silence (New Delhi), Merak Magazine (London), Scarlet Leaf Review (Canada), Wild Word Magazine (Berlin), The Readers and Writers Magazine (UK) Truth Serum Press/Bequem Publishing (Australia) and others. Winner of a 2019 Naji Naaman Literary Prize in Creativity (Lebanon). Collins is also a prize winner for the California State Poetry Society, twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize and “short listed” for the 2018 Pangolin Review Poetry Prize (Mauritius). Her photography is found in The Academy of the Heart and Mind, Fine Art America, Shutterstock, Wend Poetry, Spectrum, and others.