This week's Poet of the People is Arthur Turfa. I have known Arthur for several years and shared many a cup of caffeine with him. He is one of the Midlands' hardest working poets - constantly working on his craft and promoting his work and the work other poets, If you write poetry your path has or will soon cross his path.
~Al Black
Arthur Turfa is a poet/writer with six poetry collections, one novel, and one short story collection published. His writings appear in numerous print and online publications, A member of the South Carolina Writers Association, he is a Poetry Editor for the Eleventh Hour Literary Magazine, on the Editorial Board for the Petigru Review, and a Fiction Reader for the Northern Appalachia Review. His reviews appear in the Midwest Book Review and elsewhere. Turfa lives in Lexington, SC with and near family.
All I Can Do
Sculptors release an image they envision
from a block of Cararra or the sparks
fusing metal together. Composers render
a melody heard only by them into a
tune for everyone’s ears. Painters use
colors and shadows to display what
their trained eyes see. All I can do- I
will not speak for other poets- is to
capture the moment I experience in
one sense or another, select the words,
the sounds, all of it into something that
I carefully refashion as needed and release
it as a falconer does the bird into the
skies for all to see, to marvel, to see
what wonder I beheld and in my
own way, express what lies in them.
Long-remembered Aromas
Aromas wafted from the kitchen in
the apartment over a little shop:
crusty white French bread and Belgian Waffle
cookies before they became a staple
in those places strung along the Turnpike..
She told of wearing sabots and riding
to the ship bound for her new home. With her
some textbooks now on a shelf behind me.
Decades passed, relatives slowly spreading
across the new land, many lasting well
into their nineties. Did she sense on that
summer afternoon an urgency to
tell me things I later would understand?
I listened, then only years later began
to at last put those pieces together,
seeing gray and not merely black and white.
I have never baked, nor would even try.
Every so often I pass a place and
a whiff of le bon pain français brings me
to the kitchen above the little shop.
The Beckoning Bank
Late on an autumnal afternoon, crisp-
ness in the air warmed by sunlight, at last
reaching a stopping point downhill
from the distant ridge, Dampness around my
neck, trickling down my back under two layers.
Sturdy trees appear to invite me to
linger, their sentinel branches suggest
somewhere for me to spend time watching the
water and the beckoning bank that re-
mains beyond my grasp. Once that would arouse
a sense of frustrated longing. looking
only would not satiate me at all.
I recall dreams I chased, visions from far-
off ridges I rushed to realize , then
stumbled along paths to brambles and thorns,
only to wearily retrace my steps
to cast my glance elsewhere, to somewhere that
proved attainable even better.
Dreams and visions fade as sweet memories
supplant them, staying with me all my days.
Restored, I turn back, remembering the
bank that beckoned which I did not need.