Friday, March 22, 2019

Welcome to TWILA WOOD


Welcome to Twila Wood who is the new Chapter president of Hinterlands-a friendly group of UTSPS poets who connect via the Internet. (Thanks to Margaret Pettis who began this unique chapter several years ago.) Twila grew up on a dairy farm in Wellsville, Utah, where she learned to love the land, animals and the mountains next to her home.  She graduated from Utah State University with a degree in English. After teaching piano lessons for 20 years and school for 25 years-9th grade English, speech and drama at North Cache, she retired in 2016 and has been able to more fully enjoy her hobbies of writing, piano and reading, along with her love of hiking, camping and boating.  With various poems and personal essays published in local newspapers and books, including “Her Touch” in Mothers of Faith published by Covenant Communications, Inc, she won two first place awards and two honorable mentions in the UTSPS Poetry Contest last April 2018. Twila is excited to be part of a society who shares the unique passion of poetry.
Winter Birch
by Twila Wood

                                                                        When snow draped
                                                                        our front birch in cotton candy,
                                                                        stacked cold sugar upon each limb,
                                                                        I’d swing one drooping branch
                                                                        for a shower of dazzling powder,
                                                                        sprinkling my face with magic
                                                                        of a million tiny diamonds.

                                                                        At night she froze
                                                                        into a white-haired ghost,
                                                                        floating in the brittle air outside
                                                                        my bedroom window. Wind weaved
                                                                        through her icy tresses in tinkling
                                                                        chimes, moon beams peeked
                                                                        through her strands in chilling glow.

                                                                        Her frosted waterfall sparkled
                                                                        through the morning fog;
                                                                        by noon, her explosion
                                                                        stunned the blue sky. Graceful
                                                                        crystals clung to her branches
                                                                        like dainty pinwheels, spinning
                                                                         enchantment into winter.

Saturday, March 9, 2019

Meet Denis Feehan from Mesquite, Nevada


After retiring from aerospace, Denis Feehan  found time to devote to his passion, writing poetry and short stories. He lives in Mesquite, Nevada and joined Utah State Poetry several years ago as an At Large member. Active in music and writing, he loves to write poetry and fiction. Serving as President of Heritage Writers Guild, a chapter of the League of Utah writers located in St. George, Utah, Denis keeps busy. He recently entered the Chaparral contest-part of Redrock Writers' annual seminar and received 3rd prize recognition in the Chimera Division for his humorous poem A Very Mary Christmas. He has won awards at the annual Mesquite Fine Arts annual poetry and art contest where poets enter poems and artists select a poem as inspiration for their artwork as well as awards and publishing of his poetry from the League of Utah Writers.

TRASH DAY TUESDAY
  
The sound of thunder
like a tank brigade
forced my eyelids open
wide revealing my panic
It was Trash Day Tuesday!
and the bulging, sated cans
were still locked in the back
like felons serving five to ten

I checked the bedside clock
as if that neon dial mattered now
fact was the sun was up
and the tanks were here
I flew out of bed
like an F-18
with the wife yelling at me
as if that was gonna help

The concrete porch was glacial
on my sissy bare feet
how do penguins do it?
I ran like a football player
through a row of prostrate tires
to the grass oasis out front
but it was just as arctic
as the porch and wet to boot

I slipped as I right-turned
but got right up on my icebergs
and dashed to the side of our base
but the clock and I had failed
the thunder had waned
and the wife was pointing at
the tanks as they turned the corner
to do battle on the next block