‘Bless with Children’ and Other Poetry by Carol Kanter

Bless with Children

Sent, Amen! to fill the world with wonder
they come in trust, brim-full of possibility,
a soul (or spark from God, once split asunder)
harbored in each.  Our responsibility:
to do our best, to cherish and provide
at least the abc’s that foster health
for every body, that educate each mind.
Then Glory Be for the chance to share such wealth.
In joyous song let voices set adrift
gratitude for guidance, old and new,
and for those young we deem our greatest gift—
though surely we remain God’s children, too.
May peoples everywhere be reconciled
and together bless the children, child by child.

Nostalgia

Fresh from grand tours, with their urge to feed now weak,
salmon swim through braids of vagrant streams
past hunters armed with hook or claw or beak—
the lure a taste for home that draws on dreams.

In a silver throng, they muscle past the steep
moss-covered banks to jump the churning falls,
tier after tier—or try, fail, rest…then leap
again against the odds stacked in wet walls.

Their urge:  to spawn in waters of their birth—
blind to what awaits, as a sleeper’s mind
denies in dreams its own demise—while earth-
bound, poets sink in blue reflexive lines

such logy images—end-stopped, alone—
of dust, of drop to drop, of muscling Home.

Carol Kanter’s first published poem appeared in Iowa Woman in 1995.   Atlanta Review cited for its International Merit Award in 1998, 2003 and 2005.  Finishing Line Press published her first chapbook, “Out of Southern Africa,” in 2005 and her second, “Chronicle of Dog,” in 2006. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals and several anthologies. “No Secret Where Elephants Walk,”  and “Where the Sacred Dwells, Namaste” (DualArts Press, 2010 and 2012) marry Carol’s poetry to her husband’s photography from Africa and from India, Nepal and Bhutan. Carol has a private psychotherapy practice in Evanston, IL.

These poems are among the entries for the Society of Classical Poets’ 2012 Poetry Competition.