October 24th: Robert Milby Features
Stone Soup Poetry meets from 8-10 p.m. every Monday at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery at 106 Prospect Street with an open mike sign-up at 7:30 p.m. Featuring this Monday for the first time will be New York poet Robert Milby.
Robert Milby has hosted poetry readings throughout the Hudson Valley since 1995. He is the author of four poetry chapbooks (his most recent, The Ruin of Camelot) and a spoken word CD (Revenant Echo). He has been published in a variety of magazines and anthologies such as Hunger Magazine, Will Work for Peace, Hart, Fertile Ground, Chronogram, The Hudson Valley Literary Magazine, The Orange Voice, and Motivate a Mind.
Currently, Milby hosts a poetry series at Joey’s Café in Washingtonville, NY and at the Mudd Puddle Café in New Paltz, NY.
A sample poem from Milby is included below.
Summer Ghosts
The stench of rotting peat moss;
animals killed by ignominious drivers, last year’s onion casualties,
rises beneath an ominous,
humidity swollen August Moon.
Old Summer’s heavy ghosts sit nearby and watch.
Here is an elderly phantom,
leaning on a pretentious real-estate sign.
Another shade, merely glowing eyes,
screams from a frog dominated culvert
in a ditch near the quiet onion field.
How, then, can I walk during the death of purple ochre afterglow,
Along the access road, pavement still ornery, heat growling underfoot,
Of August’s sultry insanity?
She appears only when I remove my glasses to clean them…
Her forty years extinguished by technology.
The migrant worker’s shock would have risen through dimensions…
A mother, crushed beneath large, peat caked tires of an onion tractor.
Was it children who’d painted the memorial on the road, near the elementary school?
The swooning phantoms have sucked away grueling humidity,
to allow my word knitting on a cool back porch this morning.
Late August is a precarious time…ghosts do not wish to wean themselves of their Solar medication…
Summer has no desire to desiccate or to blush in cooler weather.
Summer knows…that having storms, only serves the kingdom of Autumn:
Frost fanfare, migrating flocks, insect funerals, and huddled animals…
