Poet Joanna Lee

Prayers in rough wood

My prayers in rough wood
are strung up with twine and hope,
spiral like incense
to an unhearing heaven,
float back to the ears of men

Who with gentle hands
unfold my finger-petals,
suck out from cupped palm
the splinters of unborn dreams,
catch the bleeding dew of faith.

Joanna Suzanne Lee lives and writes in Richmond, Virginia, USA. She writes:
“This was my first effort at a tanka (actually it’s two tanka put back-to-back), and it came from an image I took when I visited Japan two summers ago: an offering left at a Shinto shrine in Nara, where you could write your own prayers or wishes on little wood blocks and hang them on the shrine itself.”
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Poet Joe Hesch

La Luna Piena

Last night’s full moon,
resplendent in its frost-haloed glory,
shone like the brightest pearl,
perched on a phosphorescent-ringed
half-shell, like Botticelli’s Venus.
Or maybe like a silver stone
dropped into the
deepest-blue pool, and there
emitting concentric ripples
of gold, turquoise, and pink,
and a light beyond white,
casting shadows so dense
on the December snow,
I tripped over one.

Joe Hesch is a writer and poet from Albany, NY. Please give him a visit at his poetry blog, A Thing for Words at http://www.athingforwords-jahesch.blogspot.com/


Thanks for reading Poets for Tsunami Relief.

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Poet Kellie Elmore

Funeral for Revelations Sun

Gray mist rains on the mourning,
smothering earths ember
as she is laid to rest.
Trumpets sound,
a lonesome hymn
across rolling hills
and swallowed valleys.
In the darkest hour,
clarity rains
an immortal dew,
settling ash
atop a new harvest.


Kellie Elmore lives in East Tennessee. She’s been writing since she was very young, and says she can’t imagine life without her pen and music.
Please visit her blog Magic in the Backyard to see this poem http://magicinthebackyard.wordpress.com/2010/08/18/funeral-for-revelations-sun/and also, feel free to pick up a beautiful button she has designed for your blog: Love for Japan: http://t.co/vioKPxC

Thanks for reading Poets for Tsunami Relief.

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Poet Robert Smith

Now it’s beautiful

Now it’s beautiful.

The snow drips from the heavens
in white large frozen tears of
the angels and i am hypnotized
like a man struck by just how
a woman walking can leave him
speechless.

Now it’s beautiful.

Whereas before it was rainy
and gloomy, and the snow was
black and iced hard except for
the slush that was loose and ready
to give out under you no matter
how well you strut. But,

now it’s beautiful,

and i sit in the dark here in my
room. 15 stories from the ground
and the dripping tears dance
backlit by the lights of Times Square
and all i can think of is

now it’s beautiful.

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Robert Smith is a poet originally from Outside of Buffalo, NY, who lived in California, but now lives in Georgia. His Twitter page @rasmithii says he tweets his poems “from an airport near you.”


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Poet Brandee Baltzell


Taking Back

The sea lunges forth
To claim her sacred bounty
Snatched from Earth’s lax grasp


Brandee Baltzell calls herself a “fledgling poet & writer.” She lives in Surprise, Arizona.


Thanks for reading Poets for Tsunami Relief.

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