How Could She Have Known

October 31, 2015

by Joseph Robertshaw

“Halloween is not until tomorrow anyway” she said, to the small grove near her family’s home. She looked at the neat spidery handwriting of the journal again. Yes, she thought. I read it right. The spell specifically said that it could only be cast once per year and on Halloween. That is what it said, but the light that had begun to consume the entire wood now didn’t seem to care about that condition. She reached into her blouse for her cell phone. Anne Dee pulled it out and nervously made the gesture to unlock the screen. The clock said 12:03 am.

“Oh shit,” she said, as she as she looked back from the phone to the book to the slowly brightening light that almost cast the house in daylight. Suddenly she knew what she should do.

Anne Dee tucked the phone away — even though every time she did this she remembered the Dateline special about cell phones and breast cancer. She found the page in the book with the spell she had activated. Only moments ago she had thought that this book was just another relic of fakery that her family had kept in the attic, along with the collection of lava lamps and disco lights, the box of D&D stuff that no one used anymore and the holiday decorations that came out once a year for a month and lay hidden for the other eleven.

The page was entitled “The Opening”. As she read the effects for the first time her eyes grew wider, along with the burgeoning swell of undulating light that now pulsed in the side yard with no center and no sign of slowing anytime soon. It was a spell to release all of the gnomes, sprites, brownies and other fairy folk that were banished during the previous year. It would take fifteen minutes for the gate to reach the opening stage and she would have to say the key word, Kom en zie, at that point to actually open the gate.

That didn’t sound so bad. She could just wait and watch and use the spell on the next page called “Ausblenden” to close the thing before it got activated. It would only be a few moments more and who would know?

Moments passed and finally the tiny screen flashed 12:15. The tiny creatures had been visible now for several minutes bumping, and pushing one another and leaning on the force of the gateway, like Anne Dee might have leaned on a storefront window waiting for her mother to emerge on a boring Saturday afternoon. The pressure had become immense now though as the creatures started fights and pressed in from all sides. Some simply clawed at the bubble of light with bestial appendages. These things didn’t much look like the ones in the Disney tales or the Fairy Tale books at the school library. Some were downright nasty looking. When one of the meaner looking creatures grabbed another who looked more or less harmless and ripped it in half, Ann Dee decided that it was time to close this thing down.

She reached the page again and raised the book up to see the words in the light when a noise came from the door to the house. Ann Dee spun to meet the sound.

It was her mother dressed in a night gown and fuzzy slippers. Ann Dee noticed that her mother didn’t appear to even notice the blinding light coming from the gateway.

“Du Morrow iz Halloveen AnnDee” said her mother in her best stylized Dracula voice. “You zhould come in zide.”

The wall of sound was deafening. Ann Dee, now facing the house, watched her mother cower in terror from the explosion of light and noise that erupted over her daughter’s shoulder.

Sweet Futility

August 29, 2015

Joseph Robertshaw

Captured sidelong by the cusp of night I could see right away that the effort was futile. I wept for a while with the rising sun for, in the deepening blackness of this coming day, who would know? There was a certain freedom in the impending doom, a calm resolution that births confidence that can only come when we are sure, beyond any doubt, that this fate is ours, inescapable. It comes with the dawn, inexorable, like the march of the planets through the space time of the here and now, ever progressing, and yet, never moving in the mind’s eye, at that instant of epiphany caught in memory’s framed haze. Sweet futility provides me with her company as I turn my collar to the first of a million raindrops and slink back to the fire, and my book, as the steel grey sky silently swallows the sun.

My name is Joseph Robertshaw. I like poetry and prose and try to write both. I was asked to leave my high school English class and my high school but all these years later, I have just written a fantasy book. I have dropped out of high school and have earned two master’s degrees. I have taught cooking, safety, customer service and now, for the past five years, First Year Composition. I am a husband and a father and, in my life, I have killed turkeys, cooked chickens, thrown crabs, siphoned salmon. I have been a stay at home navy spouse. I have sailed the Bering Sea and rolled through Europe on the rails. I currently live in Ohio and I expect to earn a PhD in Rhetoric and Writing in 2018.

Ghost Train of Youngstown

June 20, 2015

by Joseph Robertshaw

Not long ago our earth was rich and black
Then the trains came on earth hewn, fire wrought track.
We burned hope in our fires and sold molten earth
For greenbacks and ale draughts; far more it was worth.

They dug in their spurs and rode us into the mills,
With hot blood and cold sweat the tall orders we filled.
Rail-cars stacked high with sheet & tube dreams
Rolled heavy away in dark waves of steam.

The spurs are now silent but tempered we still
Mourn empty orders that no one can fill.
The trains used to stop at each mill’s back lot
Now they roll on, already full, and no need to stop.

Our children now ask for guidance and vision
We’ve nothing left here to reach in and give them.
With our pain they were raised and handily fed
Now we’re old dried up husks and more use to them dead.

We made them a life of steel, wheels and coal,
Now away like our dreams on those rails they will roll,
To seek better fortunes and dream their own dreams,
Never seeing nor caring that they ride on our beams.

A Keyhole In The Sky

June 7, 2015

Joseph W. Robertshaw

The light pokes through a keyhole in the sky
To show us what we think we know is really a lie.
Many say the end has finally come,
But I can’t help but ask where the light comes from.
And if I might return there with it someday,
Perhaps if I am good and don’t bother anybody that much.

Star fall and light rage for night has come to call.
Surely soon we must die but what if this isn’t death at all?
Not destruction but a concerned parent peering through the bedroom door, As we lay sick and dying, they pace the hallway floor,
And we are rocking gently in the embrace of mother earth,

Waiting for the fever to pass and those soothing promises to become truth.

Oft In The Shadows

June 7, 2015

Joseph W. Robertshaw

Often in the shadows you will find me, patiently waiting for my moment in the sun, Watching his inexorable
march across the sky.
Slowly drifting over
the treetops and
opening blooms,
Like tiny drops
of sunlight
along the way.
Now and again I may creep out and catch a warm ray
Only to dash away again
Taking it home to ward against the night
Like a blanket in a cool wet misty May morning
For now I may steal my moments of fun fearing to stay too long in the sun,
But soon the day will surely come, when in summer’s warm embrace,
I will stride with upturned face and drink of the golden light.

The Deep Wood Path

June 7, 2015

Joseph W. Robertshaw

Everyone at home is asleep at the close of day
The soft scent touches my mind and I am away
On winged memory I flit along the shrouded path
Careful to dip beneath the heavy green boughs
They shall be none the wiser.

Have you come also to walk in the quavering pines?
I’ll walk with you but slightly out of time,
Perhaps when you return in your memory
We’ll walk again along the deepening path
And we will be none the wiser.

Here have I been and here I long to return.
In the wood, I was grown from the earth
And there I shall again dissolve in the end
When the dappled, muted light fades away
I shall be none the wiser.

In The Silver Light

June 7, 2015

Joseph W. Robertshaw

In the silver light we walk alone together
And meet to talk in any weather

My body thinks that I should be in bed
Still I come to drink your thoughts instead

Late into the night your words transport
Until morning beams come to report

Eyes cannot close when magic words engage
I should leave you now but still I turn the page.

In the moonlight
of the darkest night
my vision seems most clear
In soulless forest deep
your faithful company I keep
and that’s what draws me near.

The Mountain Stream

June 7, 2015

Joseph W. Robertshaw

In deeper pools and eddies whirls time can stand near still, To nourish and revive the wood
Before it babbles down the hill.
Opportunity breaks the surface and just as fast is gone Tumbling along in the frolic of the flow,
A rolling rock, a mossy rolling stone.
Time slips away, liquid, cool, insistent,
Beneath the verdant shroud of circumstance,
Unerring and unending, unhalting downward to the sea.
Chance may bend the course of time and wrest her from her bed Spilling out to feed new lands
Or revive some forgotten desert sands.
For now the rushing torrent sound as it runs across my face, Reminds me that the river soon in other forms,
Will return again to this place.
I am just a mountain so I must stand and wait.