Featured Poet: Judy Platz, Newton
 Judy Platz’ poetry has appeared in the following anthologies: Paterson Literary Review, Wolf Moon Press, The Café Review, Long Shot, Changing Tides, The Bridgton News, Winter Magazine, Credences, Loom II, The Milkweed Chronicle, Shelly’s Press, Night House Anthology, Hambone, Anemone, Uroboros, Sojourner, The Poetry Society and Atlatl Press. She has three chapbooks published: Viscerally, Tending the Dark and The Silence of Light. Online Chapbook: Northern Appalachian: Old Souls and Wolf Tracks.
It’s the journey, the travelling we do: inside our bodies, our minds, or outside: anthropologically, archeologically, metaphorically, archetypically.
We find ourselves by immersion. We are connected—earth, plant, rock, fish, bird, mammal.
The human spirit speaks -- splash the paint and be ready to defend your art. Make the world better.
Travelers -- for Murtis Taylor
Founder: Mount Pleasant Community Services Center, Cleveland, Ohio
Travelers know the journey is long between stations
Past elements form the slowly leaked knowledge—
An unexpected glance here or there from a stranger at a signal crossing
The walk of a man or woman beside you
As you step up into the daylight from the underground transit
Is it your mother’s walk? Your father’s walk?
The walk of anyone you can remember?
No.
But the walk is familiar—almost as familiar as your own skin.
Or maybe in notes of a song,
A remembrance fills your eyes with tears, with the beauty of it
And you know, you know the song
Even though you have never heard it before.
These are your pot shards, pieces of your life now
That echo in the tug of centuries;
Cleaving to dream, to vague memory
And we don’t know why.
How new to us are our own four million years--
Homo sapiens habitation.
Do distinct, distant cultures reside in our bones, our blood?
And is this the luggage we sometimes dream, traveling between stations
One border crossing and another,
When to be drawn to sit in front of a painting for hours
Mesmerized, dreaming, looking, searching for what?
In the painting time collapses, the soul remembers
This, the smallest bone fragment of evidence that time does melt.
Transported as we are,
What ancient tug of reason do we know
At night watching logs disintegrate into vapor
Feeling ancient cave fire
While our passion burns on each minute
With face pressed to the glass
As the train pulls from station to station,
Not wasting, not wanting to miss any of it.
For more information about Judy Platz visit:
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