The International Imaginarium For Word & Verse (November 29th, 2022)

Dear Readers,

Here is the link to the very last edition of The International Imaginarium for Word & Verse for the year 2022 featuring the incredible 2021 Stanley Kunitz Medal-winning poet Eve Rifkah posted last Tuesday night on our new Imaginarium website for you to hopefully peruse and enjoy at your leisure.

I want to thank my fellow bloggers John Ormsby,  Angela Wilson (AKA poetisatinta), and (Gypsie) Ami Offenbacher-Ferris for graciously accepting my invitation to participate which I previously posted on this blog. Like last time, I have decided not to repost the entire Imaginarium here on this blog as I have often done with previous editions of the Virtual Poetorium because I feel that it is probably too long a read and thus far too overwhelming for most of my readers (as a result, some really excellent poetry might be skipped, and that would be a real shame). So instead, I will just post this month’s Imaginarium group poem (which is probably one of my favorite segments of both the Poetorium and the Imaginarium). Since this was our last group poem of the year, the theme is fittingly the year 2022. Contributors were asked to send us one to a dozen lines beginning with either “This was the year of…” or “This was the year that…”. All contributions we received were then compiled and included in this month’s Imaginarium Group Poem. I want to thank Howard J Kogan, Karen Durlach, and Angela Wilson (AKA Poetisatinta) for participating and making the following poem possible (Angela’s contribution can be found published as an individual poem on her website Let’s Write…)…

The Year 2022

This was the year the threatened
Red Tide happily died at sea.

This was the year we stopped
mentioning his name,
people even gave up Bridge.

This was the year of discovery and recovery
but for some, a year of death and misery
a year of hypocrisy, invasion, and migration
of numerous variants and vast inflation
while we observed the effects of climate alteration
and now there’s controversy with the World Cup situation.
In the UK we had a glut of Prime Ministers
and the cost of electricity is bleeding us dry
there was joy in June celebrating the jubilee
but tears within months when we had to say goodbye
as a nation we joined together in the mourning
but now we have hope with the rise of a king.

This was the year of 8 billion
8 billion sets of hopes and dreams
8 billion sets of needs and wants and hungers.
Gaia tipped over, spilled tears of blood,
of flood, dry tears of drought,
melting ice, enflamed with fires, war.
8 billion thinking themselves autonomous,
each filled with billions more microbes,
bacterias, viruses, fungi, living in symbiosis,
more resilient than the vessels,
poised to evolve again.

—The International Imaginarium Group Poem for November 29th, 2022