Cranes wheeled in the sky
Their chiding cries fell to hard earth
Warm mid winter day
A pale half moon calls the birds
To stroke her face with soft wings
—
A cat sits dozing
Beneath a thorny rosebush
No foot can reach him
His paws retract the sharp claws
With a deep purr his eyes close.
—
Human frailties
wounds that bleed such heated blood
leave a dry vessel
Without the moisture of love
the clay reverts to the ground.
Jane Kohut-Bartels
Copyrighted, 2023
All reactions:
Winter Into Spring
Mysterious, silent season,
Where life and reason are suspended
Upon a cold metal wire.
The wind– a razoring of clipper glass
Sailing through glassine air
Slicing the pallid sun’s surface–
An attempt to warm a frigid earth
To remembered fertility.
–
Solemn seasonal palette,
White, gray, black,
Cut with a flash of blood-red-
A Kamikaze cardinal!
Like the demon wind bearing its name,
Dares the thin and paling air
To brighten only a moment–
A witness to recurring life.
–
Season of bountiful snow,
Brings a thirsting to the land
Where hoar-frost leaches
Moisture with a crystallized withering-
Hands to crack, bark to shatter,
And all dries and curls about
In a perverse furnace of freeze.
–
One pale day southern breezes
Break through the bonds of Winter–
They brush, sidle up
To impervious ice
And a crack like a thump is felt in the gut,
A slow drip-drip of water
Signals the end of this harsh season,
As icicles emit a hesitant stream,
Then the ice- dam down in the brook
Explodes with a thunderous sound
And the rush to Spring
Is heralded all about.
–
A slight movement underground
Felt deep in the soil-
A careful stirring,
A rumble in the gut of the surface
As birth replaces death
Pushing through Earth’s womb
To a weak sun above–
The tyranny of Winter now broken.
–
Jane Kohut-Bartels
Copyrighted, 2011, 2012
From “White Cranes of Heaven”, 2011, Lulu.com
I feel the rain waiting to be born,
hear the banshee wind
Racing round eaves,
Scaring the attic haunts,
Making hambone frenzy with
Powdery limbs.
Trees now tilting whirligigs
Ancient pin, water oaks
Dancing St. Germaine’s dance–
Frenzy below amongst quilted colors
Ruffling the feathers of nature
Tossing the spectrum wide.
I smell mossy rain finally born,
Hear the clatter on a tin roof
Smell again the musty fog
Born of a sullen, moaning stream
And head for bed under the eaves,
Shared with a Banshee wind
And a hambone frenzy until dawn.
Jane Kohut-Bartels
Copyrighted, 2020
Know that this chapter has SEX in it. If offended by the subject….Don’t Read.
MARI WAS CAPTURED within the web of a warrior with two swords under his sash, probably a very violent man, but one who wrote exquisite verse. Lord Tetsu caught her watching his face and abruptly ended his recitation of a poem. Without thinking, she reached out her left hand to his arm, her eyes swimming with tears. She was moved beyond measure with the contradictions of this man. She felt a tenderness she had not been able to feel for a long time. He grabbed her hand and pulled it into the breast of his kimono, staring at her. She, realizing he had mistaken her gesture, tried to pull back her arm, but the deed was done. Lord Tetsu stood up, pulling her to him. She shook her head.
“No, I am married.”
Laughing, he threw back his head. “Yet here you are in my chamber, naked, and you expect me to let you go? Remember you were brought here by magic and for my usage. Did you think the morning would be spent in poetry alone?” He grabbed her hands and the quilt fell off her shoulders. “I can smell your scent. You are aroused by your curiosity. You wonder what it would be like to be taken by a samurai, Woman-called-Mari. You will find out.”
He threw Mari on the futon and dropped his swords, laying them out of her reach. Untying his various kimonos, he discarded the two outer ones and left the white linen undergarment. He wore the trousers of the samurai and, with his eyes on the woman cowered below him, untied the
drawstring and let his pants fall to the ground. Mari’s eyes widened. He was a large man in life and equal to that beneath his kimono. He threw himself over her and in a low voice whispered, “Idu-go, Idu-e.” (“One moment, only once.”) He trapped her face in his large hand, his eyes holding her gaze. “The pain will be only one moment’s worth, you will fill with me and be grateful. Now, Woman-called-Mari, kiss me without struggling, for I like a docile woman in my bed.”
Mari was pinned beneath him and could only claw his shoulders. He raised himself and laughed, trapped both of her hands in his and pulled them above her head, grasping them with one of his hands. He crushed her mouth with a hard kiss. Mari moaned and spat at him, outraged at this treatment. He reached over the side of the futon and picked up a sash. Looping it firmly around her hands, he tied them to a pillar at the top of the futon.
“Stop it, stop it! I am a married woman!”
“Yet you are naked under me and aroused without my touching you.”
It was true. The sensible modern Mari was outraged at this behavior but her body was provoked in spite of her. Something stronger was at play than feminist convictions. She felt her body was abandoning her mind. Surely he knew she was not a peasant woman or a prostitute who would spread her legs for a few coins. With a mixture of tenderness and wildness, Lord Tetsu worked his way down her body, kissing her neck, her breasts and finally, her sex.
Mari’s plea for him to stop had changed to moans, the sounds of a growing desire. Her husband never made love to her this way, in fact, he avoided all such foreplay. Mari could not help but moan louder. Her face was a stretched frenzy, her eyes fluttering back into their sockets. Lord Tetsu then entered her. Mari gasped and bucked but he kept going until he was like a sword sheathed to the hilt. Her passion was now fully inflamed.
“Oh, untie me, untie my arms, please, let me embrace you,”
Mari begged. Lord Tetsu untied her arms but held them firmly. He moved in her slowly as she adjusted to him. Mari gasped, the sensations so strong she couldn’t hold back. The power of his thrusts increased as she tipped to the edge. With a yell, she climaxed, her body shaking, her voice something she didn’t recognize as her own. Moments later, Lord Tetsu joined in her delirium and with a groan, released himself. Joined together tightly, they lay panting on the futon. Mari had never experienced such intensity with a man. She curled into his arms and sobbed softly.
“You are a lovely flower. Your husband has riches he cannot count.”
Mari shuddered at the mention of her husband. She had never opened to Steven like she had to this man. It took a stranger for her to experience such arousal. The rest of the morning and into the evening they made love and wrote poetry. Mari composed haiku and recited her verses. He was tolerant of her efforts and threw back his head and laughed at her attempts to best him. At one point, he went to the chest where the black kimono lay and carefully placed it on the stone floor of the room. He brought back a quilted kimono and wrapped Mari with his now gentler hands. She thought it best not to ask whose kimono it was and was just grateful for the warmth. They drank the rest of the broth and warmed a bottle of sake.
Lord Tetsu was working on papers when there was a voice outside the shoji. He called out and two men came in, bowing deeply. They were carrying more scrolls and didn’t seem to notice Mari sitting on the futon. After bowing again respectfully to Lord Tetsu, they backed out of the room. He put the scrolls on the table and started to unroll one of them.
“Lord Tetsu,” said Mari from her comfortable place by the brazier. “It seems we exist in a parallel universe.” This seemed to be the only explanation for the situation in which Mari found herself.
Lord Tetsu grunted and shrugged his shoulders. “I have no confusion. I live now. You also live now. There is no riddle.” He dismissed her words with another grunt and sat down on his stool to read.
Mari thought it prudent not to interrupt him and looked around the room. It was rather large, obviously a room for an important official. On one side, there was archery equipment, with bows of different lengths. There were lances and other swords and what she believed were maces. If Lord Tetsu was a bureaucrat for his Shōgun, he was also a warrior. Earlier, Lord Tetsu had opened the wooden lattice of one of the windows but the light was feeble. Mari walked over to the window and looked outside at a rolling landscape that appeared medieval. There were men and woman in distant fields, looking like tiny models of humans, working with oxen drawn plows and mattocks and hoes. They were planting some crop but what it was, she couldn’t tell. Obviously, it was not rice, for the fields were not swamped. Perhaps it was barley or millet. There was a small village in the distance where a few plumes of smoke rose sluggishly in the air. Farther distance, there were mountains rising one upon the other, the atmosphere playing tricks with the color of the ridges, fading from a dark color where nearest to a misty gray far away. Outside, well within her line of vision, flew three white cranes, rising in the sky like dull stars. She knew nothing was right or sensible today. She had appeared almost on a magic carpet, far from home and time. She felt a strange calmness, almost as if this was a natural part of her life to be savored, not dissected.
Early that evening, servants brought bowls of food. As they ate, Lord Tetsu talked of archery and the legendary Lord Tokugawa. Mari had noticed red oblong objects on the arrows where the heads should be. Lord Tetsu explained that these were “whistling arrows” used to announce the opening of battles. “If you ever hear one, duck,” he said with a chuckle. “I have seen a man’s head split in two like a ripe melon. We shoot
dogs for practice but first we scare them and they run. More sport in this.” Mari winced at his words but this was his culture, not hers. Lord Tetsu poured heated sake into two cups and offered one to Mari. She liked the taste but two cups later could feel the effects. Lord Tetsu was an old hand at sake drinking, for cup after cup disappeared down his throat. He didn’t seem to get drunk but Mari knew she could not chance doing so. Turning over her cup, she signaled that she would drink no more. As darkness fell, they talked quietly together, sitting on cushions before the table.
Mari knew this interlude had to end and asked a question. “Lord Tetsu, I know now how I came to be here, in this room, but how do I go back?” “I wrap you in the kimono and you go to sleep. You will wake up next to your snoring husband. He will be none the wiser for your adventure. What has been a day in your life with me will only appear to be seconds for him.” Mari looked down to her hands in her lap. Almost in a whisper she asked him, raising her eyes to his, fearful of the answer. “Will I ever see you again?”
Lord Tetsu sat back and looked at her. His eyes searched her face and he replied in a low and gentle voice. “Mari, Woman-who-is-Married, would you chance a change in heart? Would you leave your husband to become the woman of an old samurai? Would you wish such a thing? Think carefully, girl. My world is not yours. You might wither and die here. Would you chance leaving all you know for such a fate? Can a life be built on poetry?”
Mari’s eyes were now swimming with tears. She didn’t know the answers to what he asked but she knew something in her heart had opened. Something new had startled her and brought a glimmer of a different beginning. For the first time in a long while she was feeling alive and there was no way she could explain this to him. She didn’t understand it herself.
Jane Kohut-Bartels
Copyrighted, 2018-2020
(an oil painting after Constable….JKB)
The streets are gleaming tonight
as if a million stars were brought to earth,
flattened into urban mirrors
under lamp posts reflecting
an empty nothingness.
It is a dull mid-winter night,
straining towards spring
with all intention of leaching
the dying season’s
last insult, unleashing it
upon mankind’s discomfort
one more time.
“A foggy day in London town”
Is what I think when I look down
This cotton-wool streetscape,
But that has tune and purpose,
And this muted stillness has none.
The rain left a muffling fog,
Mercifully erasing stark bones
of tree limbs reaching to the sky.
Black beggars on seasonal parade.
Yet,
there is a strange beauty to the night,
Transforming what was common,
Dissolving borders, barriers, dimensions,
Making a mirage, an alien oasis.
Heavy mists swirl around the ground,
Lift past the unfocused light
combine with the creeping gloom
And turn a fine hand to pale mystery.
Jane Kohut-Bartels
Copyrghted, 2020
DARWIN’S WORMS
The soil has lost its excellence.
Worms hide in the
Deep sullen earth
I imagine curled up,
Embracing worm castings
And each other,
Desiccated former selves
Pale little ghosts
Awaiting the fertility of spring
The watering of a hard rain.
I squandered the bloom months,
Thinking paper and pen
Would bring its own blossoming
Scarcely seeing the vitality outside
Windows,
Allowing cabbage moths and beetles
To dominate
My nod to farming,
To self-sufficiency,
My tithe to the earth.
Ah, the soil is hardened
By the sins of the season.
Sharp winds make
Furrows
The cold buries down,
Deep, deep down
Torments, teases any life
That would show a feckless head.
Especially those hopeful worms
Now bundled in worm-sleep.
The words, verse,
I chose to cultivate
Over cabbage, collards
Failed to bloom.
Better I had plied the hoe
And bucket to that
Than a fevered pen
To paper.
It is now winter.
The fallow earth
Plays a waiting game
Knows I have failed
In pulp and soil
And mocks with a barrenness
Inside and out.
Jane Kohut-Bartels
Copyrighted, 2018-2020
I feel the rain waiting to be born.
I hear the banshee wind
Racing round eaves,
Scaring the attic haunts,
Making hambone frenzy with
Powdery limbs.
Trees now tilting whirligigs
Ancient pin, water oaks
Dancing St. Germaine’s dance–
Frenzy below amongst quilted colors
Ruffling the feathers of nature
Tossing the spectrum wide.
I smell mossy rain finally born,
Hear the clatter on a tin roof
Smell again the musty fog
Born of a sullen, moaning stream
And head for bed under the eaves,
Shared with a Banshee wind
And a hambone frenzy until dawn.
Jane Kohut-Bartels
Copyrighted 2019
(Painting above by the author below)
AUTUMN DUSK
Stuttering winds blow across
Clouds tinted by the failing sun.
Brittle air softens,
Now a faded blue–
Shade of an old man’s watery eyes.
A late flock of Sandhill cranes lift off,
Pale bodies blending in the
Twilight with legs
Flowing dark streamers,
Their celestial cries fall to
Earth–
A harsh, chiding rain.
The trees in the valley
Are massed in darkness
As waning light leaches
Color from nature,
Creeps from field to hillock
And all below prepares for the
Rising of the Corn Moon.
Even frogs in the pond
Listen between croaks
For the intention of the night.
Jane Kohut-Bartels
Copyrighted, 2017-2019
Husband went out this morning to collect the eggs from the hen house and there was our now-resident snake, Snakipoo. He was wanting his breakfast, too. Fred backed away and the snake stood (or coiled) his ground.
I wrote the following poem in 2017 and got a lot of grief because of it. Too bad. The ignorance about wildlife around SW Atlanta, would fill a river with hawks shot out of the branches of trees because “They are Chicken Hawks” and even if you DON’T have chickens, hawks are still ‘fair game’. It’s just ignorance and hopefully these folk will die off and some ecological sanity will prevail.
Lady Nyo
SNAKES IN THE ‘HOOD
“When people see a snake, they think a serpent.
When they think serpent, they see Satan”
….former State Rep. Douglas Dean, who was arrested for carrying a packet of cocaine in his wallet.
Oh, my dear garden snakes,
Run and hide in the leaf litter!
You appear each spring
Birthed from that old stump,
Your beautiful duns, browns, moss greens
Intermingling with last year’s fallen leaves.
I remember you as divine jewelry
Around my slender wrists as a child.
You terrified the adults
And transformed me into Cleopatra.
A box under my bed
Disturbed by a dust mop,
A dozen of you slithered out.
The 200 year old wood floors,
Cold on your bellies.
The head of the dust mop screamed
And I never could find you all.
Did you disappear out that window
Where you dropped to the ground?
I mourned for those missing,
Learned adults didn’t care
For the miracles of nature:
Eating blackberries from
A stretch of rambling bushes,
A July North Carolina sun
Warm for the mountains
And below me,
A cottonmouth doing the same.
I backed out of fear and respect,
But the blackberries were good
And enough for both to share.
I remember the black racers
Hanging in the pine trees
And we children dared each other
To run under them,
Hoping one of us would get squeezed
In your embracing coils
But it never happened.
You knew our game.
In cultures you snakes
Were the umbilical cord
Joining all humans to Mother Earth.
In ancient Crete
You were the guardians
Of the Goddess’ great mysteries
Of birth and regeneration.
The Hopi Indians
Joined the snake of the Sky Spirit
With the snake of the Earth
And dancing with them in great reverence,
Loosened them into the fields
Where the golden corn was growing
To bless and secure their fertility.
No garden hoe will touch you,
My dear little garden snakes,
No stoning of your innocence,
I will gather your twine-ing bodies
And lift you above the ignorance of bigotry.
They violate their God’s dictates
“Even to the lesser of you amongst us”
And you without limbs or voice
are surely that.
If not beloved by God,
Surely,
You will be beloved by me.
Jane Kohut-Bartels
Copyrighted, 2017-2019
III
The dark leaned in, cool and necessary
The wind quiets the
hambone frenzy of wind chimes.
They ceased their cacophony,
To let the birds this spring night
test their dusk-calls,
unsure of voices muted
by the silence of winter past.
Off in the distance a lone train whistle
perhaps the last train home
Before night blackens the earth.
How silent the night!
Now given to owls
the piteous cries of mourning doves
And the rustle of something
In the tall weeds,
Something mysterious-
But probably not.
The night is the territory of creatures
With night vision and silent flights
Of owls with upturned ends of wings,
Silent, silent, deadly drones
Red eyes like spooks
And talons like razors.
A banshee scream of hunter
And the resounding cry of prey
Makes the heart leap into the night.
No man walks about the dark,
No one would without some primordial fear
Knowing what is given by nature is not
On par with the lowliness creature of this dark.
Only the slight babble of the brook,
The brook that fears no rocks
Or fallen limbs or anything except drought
Makes the link to daylight where we
Are sure of our place, our courage renewed.
The night belongs to other species
As the dark leans in, cool and necessary
The wind picks up and rattles leaves beneath our feet
And we turn our steps towards a world
Of less mystery.
Jane Kohut-Bartels
Copyrighted, 2016-19
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