The 101st edition of The Frogmore Papers (spring 2023) has been published and is now available from The Frogmore Press (£5.00, post free) or for Lewes residents from Skylark bookshop in the Needlemakers. With a distinctive cover by Paris-based artist Eva Bodinet, number 101 is another truly international edition, containing poetry from Ireland, the Philippines, the USA and most corners of the UK, prose from France and the USA and artwork by Ukrainian artist Marysya Rudska, as well as the usual reviews of recent poetry publications. Here’s a poem by Chicago-based poet Donna Pucciani, who makes a welcome return to the Papers with this issue.
Donna Pucciani
DIFFERENCE
It’s not the loss of morning light,
a gradual dimming done by autumn’s brush,
keeping the pink sky half-night
even at seven.
It’s the loss of birdsong.
I remember, as though it were just
yesterday, the sharp echoes
bouncing off bare April branches,
promising green and morning music
for the better half of the year,
when picking up the morning paper
becomes a bright cantata.
Now, silence is a burden
that gets heavier through the day,
then drags its leaden feet
through the weeks ahead, until
the deepening snow absorbs it
in the mummified corpse of winter.
I try to appreciate the difference
between music and the still breath
of nothingness at dawn,
which is its own music.
Absence is the fulness of zero,
when the mouths of a thousand flowers
leave behind only the memory of fragrance.
The architecture of longing
hangs in the early morning air,
suspended in space,
happy in its own emptiness,
for desire knows no death.