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Poetry Spotlight: Maril Crabtree and Her JOURNEY

Updated: Sep 20

By Flapper Press Poetry Café:


The Flapper Press Poetry Café continues to support poets from around the globe and takes great pride in featuring their new work. We begin our new series called Poetry Spotlight in which poets are invited to entice readers with a look into their latest work along with some of the poet's insight, inspirations, or favorite lines from that piece.


For our first entry, we invite Maril Crabtree back for a closer look a new her poetry book: Journey.


 


Ode to the Ambivalence of Time 


Since Buddha we’ve known time vanishes into the universe.

Lifetime after lifetime, we cast bottled notes to eternity.


Since Einstein we’ve known time bends with light and space.

Clocks melt into uselessness except for the music of their ticks.


Time links us with stitches unseen by the naked eye but felt

by the unfettered heart. The door that stayed closed when


it could have been thrown open, the questions never asked,

the love not declared. Yet time crawls across the windowpane,


still hungry for the honey of another day. 


 

Favorite lines:


“.  . . Yet time crawls across the windowpane,

still hungry for the honey of another day.”


 

Why I love these lines:

Time has always been a deep mystery to me, and many of my poems explore the complex contradictions time has for us—how it can flash by or drag on, how it is both invisible and essential, how it connects with memory. It’s as if time itself can’t decide what it wants to be when it grows up! The metaphor above captures one of those moments. My rational mind would never have thought of comparing time to an ant in search of honey; only when I was lost in words, as I so often “lose track” of time, did that metaphor appear on the page. Like the ambivalence inherent in time, my new book, Journey (Kelsay Books, 2024), explores the ambivalence in many things, both hopeful and horrific, in our world.


 

JOURNEY can be purchased on Amazon or at Kelsay Books.

More of my poems can be found at www.marilcrabtree.com


 
Maril Crabtree


Another Maril Crabtree book, Fireflies in the Gathering Dark (Kelsay Books, 2017), received a 2018 Kansas Notable Books award. She previously served as poetry editor of Kansas City Voices, and her poems, essays, and short stories have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She believes that a poem’s apothecary of words, of sounds spoken and absorbed, can be a healing force in our culture.





 


We welcome submissions for compelling poetry and look forward to publishing and supporting your creative endeavors. Submissions may also be considered for the Pushcart Prize. Please review our guidelines before submitting. By submitting your work to Flapper Press, you agree to allow us permission to publish. Please note that we receive numerous submissions throughout the year and endeavor to publish as soon as our calendar allows.


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