Page 74 - Wallingford Magazine Issue 56 Autumn 2025

Our Poetic Town

Welcome to Our Poetic Town. In 2018, I took a poetry workshop at the Frost Place in Franconia, New Hamp-
shire and returned home with extra skills and a paperback ,“Robert Frost’s Poems.” We are most familiar with
a few of his works but there are so many more we are not. Here is a short Frost poem for you to ponder and
enjoy along with other local contributions. Karen J. Ciosek

Canis Major In My Cage of Words,
Why Can’t I See the Bars?
The great Overdog Odd turns of mind stalk me in small steps.
That heavenly beast Thoughts start to freeze,
With a star in one eye, my lips, pause,
Gives a leap in the east. lose their will
and cease the work I give them.
He dances upright Yet, times no words
All the way to the west serve more than one end.
And never once drops
On his forefeet to rest. I feel this
When I write poems
I’m a poor underdog, that don’t quite speak with my true voice.
But tonight I will bark
With the great Overdog In poems,
That romps through the dark. what works, flows
by Robert Frost what can bind,
what means the most
when it finds a place to rest in me,

A Poet’s Fire the self-made clear
by the tongue it knows
If poetry fades and silence onward reigns, now.
The rivers hush, the mountains made to sigh, by Karl Traichel
no whispers will be left, no sweet refrains,
Just empty words that weakly pass us by.
No sonnets spun by evening’s passive glow,
No lyrics carved n ancient faceless stone, Wise Old Owl
The winds forget their airy songs to show, From his perch
And hearts grow bitter cold, untouched, alone. His strong talons grip the branch
No ballads sung on warring shores so vast, The great horned owl contemplates his
No echoes held in longing time’s embrace, surroundings.
The present pale and dull, the future past, Undisturbed, unflappable, unruffled,
a world without its heaven’s voice and grace. his bright yellow eyes
A poet’s fire refuses quelling sleep, regard the woodlands below.
For in the spoken words we call our own, A zen master, he observes, detached.
a world alive will always verses keep. by Lara Anderson

by Eddie Morales

74 WALLINGFORD MAGAZINE - AUTUMN 2025