Clarity by Roy Beckemeyer

“…notes
adults have trouble
hitting, holding”
—Kevin Rabas, “Easy for Me”
 
Our notes of childhood
ring out clear and higher
than our post-pubescent
drones, sing, still, somewhere
across the dimensions
of time, out of synch,
now with the photon-
painted gold-toned movies
of our lives, the flurry
of image and sound
complicated sinewave
mixtures that refract
and reflect and sliver
through slits to devolve
into constituent colors
and notes pure as carefree
days where you and I
run through light bright
with promise, heads high
and voices brilliant
with the clarion-clarity
of youth recalled.

Roy Beckemeyer’s latest book is Mouth Brimming Over (2019, Blue Cedar). Stage Whispers (2018, Meadowlark) won the 2019 Nelson Poetry Book Award. Music I Once Could Dance To (2014, Coal City) was a 2015 Kansas Notable Book. Roy Beckemeyer has designed and built airplanes, discovered and named fossils of Palaeozoic insect species, and once traveled the world. Beckemeyer lives with and for his wife of 60 years, Pat, in Wichita, Kansas.

Guest Editor James Benger is the author of two fiction ebooks, and three chapbooks, two full-lengths, and coauthor of four split books of poetry. He is on the Board of Directors of The Writers Place and the Riverfront Readings Committee, and is the founder of the 365 Poems In 365 Days online workshop, and is Editor In Chief of the subsequent anthology series. He lives in Kansas City with his wife and children.