Elizabeth Poreba

Self Help

Elizabeth Poreba

For the retired and/or retiring, a personal exploration claiming to be a self-help manual, a poet's musings on the experience of no longer having much to do and being disinclined by shyness to join a book club.
Life could become a summer afternoon, a slow swim in a warm lake. I could become another backyard roustabout, part of the greedy gang eying the vegetable garden. The larcenous woodchuck returns. We exchange a long gaze but he gives no clue of what to do next.
The poems ponder various ways to adapt to unaccustomed leisure–napping, complaining, gardening, volunteering, and so on. Observing time's curious way of intermittently sprinting then lollygagging, and understanding more clearly every day that time doesn't exist anyway, the poet relishes moments, which are
… liable to be caught like a leaf in the eddy of a brook, lodged only long enough to look,
and which become her subjects.

Vexed

Elizabeth Poreba

When asked how to pray, Jesus advises his listeners to be brief, unlike those who «think that they will be heard because of their many words» (Matt 7:8). This statement, like many others in scriptures, raises questions. How many words are too many, and how else besides words to ponder Holy Writ? In these poems, Elizabeth Poreba seeks to keep Jesus' advice in mind while examining her life as a convert from a Puritan-infused Congregationalism to Roman Catholicism.