Dear Mr. Logan--
Please consider the following two poems--"Born Again in Stone" and "The Long Journey" for inclusion on your site.
I live and write in New Jersey, and my poems appear or are forthcoming in numerous print and online journals. My first chapbook, IIlusions Delusions and Dreams: Visions of the Surreal in Art (Naissance, 2009) was just published and is available from chapbookpublisher.com.

Sincerely,
Neil Ellman
Livingston, NJ


Born Again in Stone

Yesterday
On the 25th of December
In the year of my death
I was turned into a stone.

I felt nothing
Saw nothing
There were no sounds
But I knew somehow.

There was a stillness
Never night, never day
No way to know
But I did.

For the first
And only time
I felt solid and defined
Content as the earth

As only the earth does
When it knows
The soft emptiness
Of life.

It was Christmas Day
When I was born again
Into a nativity
Of chiseled stone.


The Long Journey

Some of us are left.
We avoided the main roads
Circled the sentry posts
And slept in old barns
With faded tobacco signs
And rusted cars
With their seats removed.
The coyotes howled
And left their marks
But we covered ours over
Leaving no trace.

The first died of thirst,
A man who said
He had a family in the south--
Two sons, he said,
Who would go to school
And read his letters
And have children
Of their own;
The next of despair--
He sat by a tree
And stared at
The inconsiderate sun
Breathing slowly
And finally not at all;
The others went later--
One shot from behind
The rest of white heat
And black starvation
The last by a rattlesnake.

It’s just over the horizon now
And whoever is left
May see our El Dorado
Before we die.