Barbara Daniels
My Ladye Nevells Book
Here on your grownde
a marche before battell,
souldiers, footemen.
Trumpetts blare. Tantara.
Tantara. The bagpipe,
the drone. O my ladye.
Bloode. Ladye, ladye,
I see you crying.
*
After the victorie: the galliarde,
the barlye break, the pavian.
Now is the month of Maying.
Ladye, will you walk the woods
soe wylde, bloode washed away?
It is an olde country game,
the barlye break, three couples
coupled, one at the midpoint—
the base known as hell. You
are in prison here. The carman
whistles. A fancie now, a pavian.
On This Date in History: June 27, 1945
A stamp was issued, a little purple Roosevelt.
Ralph A. Bard wrote a top-secret memo
urging Secretary of War Stimson to warn Japan
about the bomb. Senator Theodore G. Bilbo
told his colleagues that Richard Wright’s
Black Boy was a damned lie, filthy, dirty.
Margaret Truman stepped from a plane,
holding her picture hat, clutching
a clutch bag, wearing white gloves.
Her father the President put on a bow tie.
He told his neighbors in Independence
that people expected impossible things of him.
He said “ordeal” and “win a peace that will last.”
Mrs. Adeline Lyons died. Mrs. Iona E. Oldham,
James Robert Younger, William Wilt, Ed Wiles.
In a letter to a soldier, a woman wrote that
their daughter said, “Where’s Mommy?” and
“water.” The soldier ate a supper of boiled beef.
Barbara Daniels’ Talk to the Lioness was published by Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press. Her poetry has appeared in Qwerty, Image Journal, Rogue Agent, and elsewhere. She has received four fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.