Three Poems
Janice D. Soderling

A Silver Flash

A silver flash of fishes in the bay

confirms the close of this September day.

The gray and pink of ancient granite rock

marks my recurrent path past stick and stock

and scanty clumps of heather, pink and gray.

In chattering, smattering haste to be away,

forsaking their frail daubs of spit and clay,

the swallows soar in one cohesive flock:

a silver flash.

No matter that I cry and beg to stay;

a daub of spit and clay on bone is prey

to despot time. Here where I quickly walk,

the upswell took millennia to clock.

One more will weather stone to sand, and mock

my decades disappearing as one day:

a silver flash.

- - -

The Spider

How small her span.

How great the plan

her little mind conceives:

to spin a thread,

to weave a web

anchored on twigs and leaves.

- - -

Some Parting Thoughts about Life and Death

I don’t expect streets paved with gold,

Nor cherubim when I croak.

Heaven is a myth, I think,

Or possibly a joke.

Is there then nothing after death?

I pause to wave farewell,

And say, “Fear not, I’m sure there waits

A kinder kind of hell.”

- - -

Janice’s notes: “Fall ruthlessly brings home to us thoughts of temporality. These three poems, in differing ways, are about time and impermanence.

“I once spent a few summer months on Idö, a small island in the Tjust archipelago, one of many such along the Swedish east coast in the Baltic Sea.

“Idö has a heritage of maritime piloting since the days of King Gustav Vasa in the 16th century. The task of guiding royal and merchant ships through the maritime fairways was passed down in islander families, father to son, generation after generation.

“Eventually, a wooden tower was erected and manned for wartime and peacetime surveillance of the ever-changing seascape.

“I lived, that distant summer, in the pilot lodgings situated on the ground floor of the tall lookout tower, decommissioned in 1987. Despite a sign PRIVAT on the outer door of my temporary home, it sometimes happened that I woke up from an afternoon nap to find nosy and noisy tourists in my bedroom.

“None of which is relevant to ‘A Silver Flash’, except that it is one of several poems I wrote that summer. It was first published in the Australian broadsheet, The Flea, and later in my collection, Green Ivy Grows Over Their Graves, Tra La.

“September is the month when we notice myriads of large and small webs of orb spiders stretching across woodland paths, colonizing garden fences, sometimes glistening from early morning dew, sometimes littered with small carcasses.

“The spider, I assume, has no anxious thoughts of an afterlife; only a momentous plan to eat, mate, and secure the next generation. Like humans, she tends to attach her scheme to flimsy anchor points.

“A third perspective on the eternal question of ‘what’s next’ is the quite fresh ‘Some Parting Thoughts about Life and Death’.

“The two latter poems are in my forthcoming collection, Short Circuits.”

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Janice D. Soderling has published several collections of poetry and of prose, most recently Naming the Names under the imprint of Kultivera Production.

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Three Poems Janice D. Soderling

Three Poems
Janice D. Soderling