Resemblences
poem by Nels Hanson
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Look into blue shadow, past the welding
shop’s sliding doors and you see Hephaestus with his hammer pounding Hermes’ winged hat and sandals to bring the bad news, magic armor of Achilles ready for the coming war. In the orchard at noon the young woman from Oaxaca hands her husband a ripe peach and Eden falls west of Nod. That silver plane droning above scattered white clouds? A B-29 a century off course, brave pilot and navigator ghosts in their leather jackets lined with fleece, now the white-haired bombardier releases napalm on his foreign country. Long miles of telephone poles provide a cross for every citizen, each failed savior, far angels singing through the dozen wires. A calendar’s torn leaves, free of months and days, Halloween and Easter, spiral in the whirlwind that spoke to Job, simple paper made of rags. The still ditch sparkling in the morning’s summer sun waits for spaced ripples of a journey, familiar feet treading softly on fathomless water again. |
About the writer
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Nels Hanson grew up on a small raisin and tree fruit farm in the San Joaquin Valley of California, earned degrees from U.C. Santa Cruz and the U of Montana, and has worked as a farmer, teacher and contract writer/editor. His fiction received the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award and Pushcart nominations in 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2016. His poems received a 2014 Pushcart nomination, Sharkpack Review’s 2014 Prospero Prize, and 2015 and 2016 Best of the Net nominations. He lives with his wife Vicki on California’s Central Coast.
If you like Nels' work, check out his piece, "A List", which was published by iō earlier this year. |