“The Aureal Hour”

by Sölvör Bjarna

From Eastern bourne doth amorous Night emerge,
Full smitten with the smould’ring golden gaze
Cast on her bower by bold Day at the verge,
Bronze-armoured in a molten amber haze.
Westward he treads, aslant his sun-bossed shield
The hours striking in ascending chime,
Till he surrenders once again the field –
As ever, vassal to the rule of Time.
Yearning, the limbs of day and dusk extend,
The darkling reaching fervent for the light,
While, e’en as nether-ward his step must tend,
The ardent flings his hand toward the night.
For there is nothing gold that would not fade,
Nor noontide gleam unwed to midnight shade.

—

A Sonnet

by Michael Helsem

Gray just fades with a weary tuft of thunder,
nothing golden in this savage evening.
Yet are we caught in preternatural burning.

Songs I cast, seeking the perfect reader
with saddle-stapled love, munificent whisper
less & less, the years teach me to stifle.

Young rabbits round the yard intent on skiffle
freeze at a distance, charmed by my shape's fanged piper,
then move again, seeing its wretched shuffle.

Cathedral we raised, of brash & moment-flourish
glory, has entered where the glass shards scuffle
under intruder tread, & never repair...

—Hour most full of rare ascensions, nourish.

—

“Contentment’s Change”

by Sarah Reardon

“This is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.” - Willa Cather, My Antonia

As naturally as sleep to the tired child,
As sweet as sunrise on the summer morn,
As tender as the baby’s skin, and as mild,
Contentment comes with cooing Joy, just born.
She comes with rags to wipe away the mire -
The leftovers of Longing - and fresh water,
Scooped up from someplace great, something entire.
She will clean the place, with her ruddy daughter.
She arrives in the calm between the storms,
While bluebirds sing together after strife,
As the nourished soil makes way for worms,
Which wriggle with the promise of new life.
And not unlike the soft earth after rain,
Those she serves themselves have been dissolved, changed.

—

“Power Trip”

by Thomas Mixon

After the neighbors’ two-hundred gram
aerial repeaters struck the sky, I swam
in the pond, through the thick aerosol,
close enough to smell their alcohol.
Who knows why they lit their flame
before dusk – I was happy I could aim
my way to where you liked to nest,
imagining you scared and stressed.
Of course my probing made it worse.
You wailed your water-witch lament
until I left, stumbling on shore, a curse
I can’t, in all the sunsets since, resent.
The many times I’ve fallen off the deck
remind me what I’m not meant to protect.

—

“You Are My Golden Hour”

By Royal Rhodes

You bring me life that comes from nothingness.
Other writers said the same and better.
But how I came to love and love confess
I found in you, and in your name each letter
like a torch had burned away the dark,
made me rise out of that underworld,
to silence nightingales, exalt the lark,
and see the hosts with sunlit flags unfurled.
So like a fallen city, I surrender,
lift the gates, unlock my prison's bars,
who once was love's most blind and chief offender,
but now awakes to gaze on strings of stars.
Awake, I feared the halting breath I'm taking,
but now my sleep is rounded by this waking.

—

“Holy Wednesday”

by Timothy E.G. Bartel

The oil that she poured seemed frivolous,
The glugging and the shining and the smear
Of glowing amber down His feet. A curse
Came to my mind then, for the weeping whore.
I tempered what I thought with what I said:
“The cost of this perfume is better spent
Upon the poor.” It’s true enough: the aid
Of the unfortunate and all that cant.

But I have been dishonest with myself,
And thus have been dishonest with the world.
I have returned a dozen times to sell
What I bought yesterday. What of the girl?
I think of her preserved in golden amber,
While I am blanked within this empty chamber. 

 —

“Brom Bones”

by Timothy E.G. Bartel

In reverence or resigning, that's the choice
We all must make eventually, the nod
To someone else's will—beloved, God,
Or tyrant—always there resides a voice
Within us, waiting to respond, rejoice,
Relent, or otherwise give way. We plod
Oblivious most days like Ichabod,
Believing that we can ignore the choice.

But always there is that impending road
The one that passes through the chestnut grove,
Where, matted with the vines of time, the trees
Become a kind of cave. This path is owed
To every living soul. Say—what blade clove
The head from him who, faceless, gapes and sees?

—

"The Clover Field"

by Arthur Malory

It was the golden hour of the eve
And the lord looked out from his high gable
To his field of Good Fortune there enclosed.
“I believed too strongly that I might weave
Luck and fortune, this my gambling table,
And so fix my fate to peace and repose—
Alas it’s not so simple, for now to leave
I must dispose of greed’s vaunted fable—
The four-leaf clover I plucked but never chose.
Yet must once again crouch and crawl and reave
You, blessed clover, as I enable
My escape in a longbox, thus enclosed.”
The field of Good Fortune swallows whole
The total sum of grief of men in gold.