The Poem of the Month for February 2025, selected by 2025 Anthology editors Val Braendler and Ben Adams, is Remembering Mark Twain by Erica Jolly. The commended poems are Another Day at the Home for Incurables by Cary Hamlyn, glance by Billy-Jack Johnstone and The Soul’s Code by Inez Martinez.
Remembering Mark Twain
Erica Jolly
This story comes from
Back Matter – the archives
of Lapham’s Quarterly
‘Philosophy’ Volume VIII,
No. 3 Summer 2015.
You warned us all
about the temptation
to vice and corruption
in your satire The Gilded Age.
Plutocrats – all hungry –
finding immense riches
in technical advances
after the Civil War.
Given this title –
‘The Age of Moghuls’.
Avarice and great power
in the hands of the few.
None of your beloved
democracy of the heart
in the society you skinned
in your ‘Tale of Today’.
Now, in 2025, the same
only worse with technology
able to manipulate and lie
in a way not known before.
A would-be demagogue
with such vanity and cupidity
is able through billionaires
to buy enough votes to rule.
He trumpets his aim to take Gaza,
evict millions of grieving people,
develop it so ‘the world’s people’
will relish America’s new Riviera.
You didn’t have this daily parade
of arrogance and indifference
on television screens in your age.
I think you would be weeping today.
Another Day at the Home for Incurables
Cary Hamlyn
Mrs Cottee hovers near the ceiling
in a nest of limbs and crumpled linen,
balanced precariously over her hospital bed,
her bare bottom red as a baboon’s.
Below her on either side are a squad of
half-baked nurses pimply-faced
sixteen-year-olds like me
their teeth laced with barbed wire
now snapping dangerously close
to her dangling benumbed leg.
‘Hurry up and get that sheet off’
shouts one nurse to another,
her authority measured in stature
rather than years.
There’s a scramble of urgent movement
a whirling dervish of soiled whiteness
as dirty linen is whipped to the floor,
and clean starched linen replaced.
‘Pugh – what a disgusting mess’
says the bossy nurse, wrinkling her nose
‘oh, gross’ agrees another
‘quick before it happens again!’
Mrs Cottee swings in her snare immobile
in her neck brace makes no sound
as tears run down her cheeks.
Once a hospital Matron now
another mute, powerless statistic.
glance
Billy-Jack Johnstone
blind introspection
hand me the scalpel
rest me on the operating table
examine my own innards
with a deeply furrowed brow
ego a foreign concept
what’s this?
and what’s that?
and where’s it all go?
tracing veins like wires
to the source of my heartache
old blood, new blood, my blood
truth and tumor indistinguishable
unsteady hands make a mess
unprepared and underqualified
I long for Right and Wrong
to punish or absolve me
dichotomise grey to black and white
but there are no shortcuts to living
each second with baton grasped
handing the Now to the Next
can I pull pattern from perception?
predict and anticipate
interrogate perfunctory emotion
curt exposition
amateur stitches and one bloody scalpel
no closer
to healing
The Soul’s Code*
Inez Martinez
Walk home, sunburning,
garden hose curled over shoulder
transistor radio tucked under my arm like a guitar.
Casey Kasem guiding my heart with American Top 40
savouring each song, rote learning words,
they connect me to the earth.
Up an almond tree, free
from our blistering bark backyard
singing Help me if you can I’m feeling down
a lyrical mantra too young yet to understand.
Living inside the seed of my beginning
made from red dirt and Aussie rock,
learning to work like a man.
In 40° heat, the Grease soundtrack
melts over the PA during recess while I
choreograph routines to ‘Summer Nights’ and
‘Look at me I’m Sandra Dee’ – nothing makes me happier.
Songs play like postcards to a better place,
a treasure map back to myself.
Countdown on Sunday nights
Jagger’s moves bolt me to the box,
Bon Scott shouts out how far
it is to the top (answer: a long way).
My soul’s map winds like strings without end,
threads through coded lyrics, music charts, dance,
my heart’s beating arteries live for the stars,
finds love in the neck of songs
tells me … to hold on
tells me … where I belong.
* * * *
James Hillman wrote a book called The Soul’s Code. His essential message: to find meaning or purpose in life is to look at the seeds of your beginning. Look at what you did as a child, what things you were drawn to before society, or parents influenced your path.