Stone Soup Croutons is a weekly poem I write using lines and impressions picked up from poems overheard from Stone Soup's open mic readers and features. I figure out a title (and sometimes the rest of the poem) later. You can read the other ones I've done since 2015
here. To paraphrase Lorne Michaels, this poem doesn't go up because it's ready, it goes up because it's Friday morning.
Last night was
Stone Soup's tribute reading for Walter Howard, organized by Joan Kimball, who along with Debra Martin put together Walter's posthumous collection,
Reflections in Moonlight. The poem I came up with last night was compiled from both the selection of Walter's poem read by the speakers and the small open mic that followed afterward.
I was suffering from a head cold last night, so I wasn't up to my usual standards. I took almost no pictures and no notes from the event. I was able to take videos of each reader (which helped enormously for the writing of this piece), but sadly the videos were riddled with sounds of me breathing erratically, coughing and unwrapping lozenges.
In a lot of ways, it was a more ephemeral experience than poetry readings normally already are, which is what Walter probably would have liked. He defied posterity, which is why I'm glad we have people like Joan and Debra to give Walter's poetry the respect and the opportunity to be read that it always deserved. Let this poem be my own overdue tribute to his life and work.
Where We'll Gather Again
Meet me at the sidewalk cafe
that all the hipsters shun,
where the roses unironically wait
to be placed as a crown
for your favorite cousin
or a wreath to thrown down
by the latest fallen poet.
