The aptly-named A Simple Morning Prayer pleads for understanding and love, for connection and illumination in a handful of terse lines. This piece is evidence that a poem need not be complex or long-winded to be a thing of authentic beauty and power.
BY VINCENT PUZICK I remember the smell of toast. I was in the middle of my morning minutes of Transcendental Meditation when my mother got home from her graveyard shift at the hospital.
Kelly Joslyn's quiet and simple poem Before the Hunt is a childhood reminiscence of her father. The child's early-morning attentiveness to her father extends to the dim lighting and the smell of the tangerine, like looking at an old Polaroid of something from childhood.
