My seventh Poet of the People is Jo Angela Edwins. What impresses me the most about Jo Angela is her humor and ability to find the divine in unexpected places.
Jo Angela Edwins is the poet laureate of the Pee Dee region of South Carolina and a professor of English at Francis Marion University. Her collection A Dangerous Heaven appears in 2023 from Gnashing Teeth Publishing.
Parts of Speech
Verbs do the heavy lifting:
shoot, explode, weep, scream.
Adverbs tell us, mostly, how:
often, swiftly, wildly.
Adjectives describe:
fearful, mad, thunderous.
Conjunctions link:
armed and dangerous, dead or alive.
Articles define:
an ally, the enemy.
Prepositions direct:
over the wall, through the tunnel, across the killing field.
Interjections exclaim:
Stop! No! Help!
Nouns remind us
that earth is filled with places
where people turn persons
into things.
When Louis Armstrong Landed on the Moon
Quiz question: Who was the first person to set foot on the moon?
Student answer: Louis Armstrong
Picture his space helmet
specially equipped
to accommodate the trumpet.
He must have resembled
a Seussian cartoon:
that polished horn
sticking stiffly through the visor,
the aperture gasketed
tightly with polymers,
a protection against oxygen leaks,
for this man with elastic cheeks
needed all the air he could get
on that airless orb
to shatter silence across
the Sea of Tranquility.
His jaunty rendition
of “When the Saints Go Marching In”
bopped its best that day,
and those saints in their heaven
that hovered like a low ceiling
over his bobbing head
realized slowly
that their feet had gone to tapping
against narrow golden streets.
As he leapt from rock to rock
across that milky desert,
surely his heart skipped beats
in time to music. Back home,
Mission Control heard his gritty vibrato
crooning a capella
through the fuzz of the two-way
as he gazed backwards at the foggy earth:
I think to myself—
what a wonderful world.
(Originally published in Porcupine Literary, issue 2, Summer 2020)
The Lilies You Sent
were lovely for so many days,
and I cannot bring myself to throw them out.
They still offer sheen and a shadow of flair,
but the petals fall in a whoosh. Gravity
is brother to death, and all the green is blackening,
and the water that once held them firm goes brown,
and even a carpel comes tumbling down
here and there. I collect what falls,
dutiful steward to withered angel wings,
and my fingers stain with the glitter of each anther,
the pollen that would propagate what lived
had it not died for the sake of spreading kindness,
a better reason than most, I suppose, to die,
and for this killing that brightened my life, I thank you.