Poetry of the People Featuring Arthur Turfa

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.