My last Poet of the People for 2024 is Bo Petersen. I have known Bo Petersen for several years, but had never engaged him as a poet until a couple years ago.
Bo is a kind, gentle and quirky (in all the ways quirky can be good) poet who has the gift of making his readers smile and want to become his friend. Hearing Bo read his work is to sit in his living room with a cup of hot chocolate, a plate of Oreos, and sharing the fragile beauty of being alive.
~Al Black
Bo Petersen is aimlessly good on his feet. Published since he was a child, relieving him of having to grow up. (Or if you have to: Wrote the non-fiction Washing Our Hands In The Clouds, Kachi, a book of verse and photography, Fezziwig Press, 2023. Also, Soldiers Stories - a book of vignettes about World War II veterans, published by the Gaston Gazette. Short stories and verse in nearly four dozen journals.)
Aurum
“Know who you are. Know the mystery you celebrate”
burnishing,
burnishing,
burnishing
tongues
ice rill fingers puckered numb, the steel sieve
sun
“he’s his own worst enemy”
a crude pan in a cold hand
burnishing
new blaze
*
who has sinned so he is blind? neither
is he blind or do we see
all it takes is spit
a little humility
“well, theoretically it’s a good scenario
but there’s a practical impediment”
so i glean
fool’s gold
flecked
insensibility
civilization demands emancipation, demands
or all is intrigue
the grave weight of this given earth frees
into Whose hand we
sieve, despite what we believe spirit agleam a particle stream
shook of space, dust
shining
spirit
is beauty, beauty is
spirit
all we know of earth
imperfect
cultivate
create
love
perfects
or all is just creed
*
o i’d like to be Learn’d, i guess
adeptly key in a daunting Op-ed
screed a piece out of Poetry to bleed their heads
o i’d learn’d to be like, i guess
*
all i yearn is beauty,
simply,
beauty
suffices
go on, ask
what it is i dream
in chanting streams, in ulule tongues, ulule
reeds,
i am stealing wings.
as dismissive as these
radiate coals in the cold
i leave
flights of white ibis flashing dawn
egret in pairs lifting in shine
from a shook pan in mist freeze
(who died waiting sale)
gone, gone, no mournful white
joy
8,000
souls unslaved
off Gadsden’s pitch dock
to the salt harbor
splayed
blanched bones scraping hissing sands
with no grave
- for the IAAM, Charleston
Nativity
ignorant would it be to whisper
Lord
we’ve blasted past
the purpled robes, the mock angelic
thinlit candle in the cold sepulchre
of our souls
light years
we are weaned
past pretense
past dwarf planets
swelled of gravid moons
out the far womb of what we now know
pulses
I tell you
yet
push
not in the patinas you don’t see
the blood, the spew
bowels
the dread in the eye of the man who had been told
there is nothing like this
to be
the strangely agape sheepherders
the magical jangles
of robed wanderers of stars
nothing, he must have thought, nothing
like this
you could conceive
(the point)
poetry,
the point is,
where
metaphor becomes parable
song,
sense.