Two of our prolific Winning Writers newsletter subscribers recently sent me great poems that I wanted to share with you. Duane L. Herrmann is a Kansas poet, farmer, and essayist about the Bahá’í faith. We often compare notes about the weather when he sends me his publications news for the newsletter. In this new poem, he describes cutting down an unusual dead tree before snowstorm season.

SAVING THE FENCE

Tree with seven trunks,
all dead,
like spread fingers,
or an open fan,
against the sky,
but some falling.
More will fall
across the fence
with destruction
unless…
until…
brought down
with purpose
which was, eventually,
done.
Now, vacant space
opens the sky
with stubs remaining.

****

Samantha Terrell‘s newest poetry collection is Dismantling Mountains (Vellum Publishing). From the book blurb: “Terrell uses innovative and traditional poetic forms to shine a light on social and ecological issues, allowing the reader to become part of conscious change. An internationally published poet with a global perspective, Terrell moves naturally between themes, from writing her own creation myth, to motherhood, nature, war, and poverty and abundance.” Samantha promotes her fellow poets on her blog Shine, which features a new author every 2-4 weeks. I loved the unique marriage of hot and cold imagery in the poem that she’s allowed me to reprint below.

LUMIERE

Snowball sun
requests an audience
with our eyes.

Insistently, she presses her glassy
winter white bosom
against the backs of

soldier spruce and
mighty maple’s
bare branches–

forcing great flashes of
her soul through gaps, to
glimpse us.