Martina Reisz Newberry
Roll With The Changes .org

“Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.”

--Allen Ginsberg

A POEM FOR YOU

This year’s nightmares are next year’s sonnets.  The words exist for people I don’t know,

I write them to alleviate the guilt of a population—people I’ve never met, people who never were.

It’s all right, I tell them, to regret your sins and sorrows.  It’s all right to lean into the corners of your couches

and beg for forgiveness.  It’s normal, I say, to look into the Who’s Who in America and want to see your name. 

You are right, to envy the names there and to start counting your failures. 

I know how it is:  not receiving prizes reeks of sweaty palms and botched attempts.  Go ahead,

think these things through.  Our lives are fragrant with death, with the intrusion of aging, the reckoning

of death’s influence on our desires and dreams, the desperate tenderness in the face of certain oblivion.

Still, each poem tries to right last year’s wrongs. I must have been born to make something of my days…

After all, how many missing husbands does it take to show the Black Widow what she really is?

There are consolations: we vibrate with remembered lust (there is eroticism in every breath),

we arrange chaos to avoid boredom, and what we leave behind disappears with rare tact. 

Welcome!

I am so glad you stopped here. Take the time to wander a bit and experience a little of what I do and who I am.

I think you'll find that poetry is not a mystery or a riddle or something only a few readers can understand.

I view my work as a way to show you the world through my eyes and then, perhaps, in a new way, through your own eyes.