Dan Guenther: Two Poems

The Kite Surfers’ Chorus, Cronulla, 2018

The soprano you hear on Cronulla’s Shark Island

as the night falls

could only be a benign sea-nymph,

a daughter of Nereus,

Lord of dark oceans,

whose Sirens calling over the waves

once led seafarers

to their doom,

an illuminating fate wandering Odysseus escaped.

You heard their four part harmonies from a distance

before you observed them sitting on the rocks

combing out their hair,

their melodies evoking old themes

of mermen and mermaids living in the moment,

and luring others to release and liberation,

temptations as temporary and impermanent

as footprints left on the sand,

about to be washed away.

Dan Guenther

The Last Story
(For my grandmother at 94, born in Austria-Hungary)

Her last tale revealed a story within a story,
a tale of courage never heard before
at your bedside meetings,
the ones where she often told
an idealized version of the past,
seeing the hand of Fate in every trivial event.

The paths she…