Miscellany Heartstrings: Poetry Collection

By G. Daniel Brockner

Miscellany Heartstrings is a collection of poetry that was twenty years in the making.

Although some of these poems were written according to rules of traditional construction, many are not, and to me, these are the poems that make writing stimulating.

A poem written from the catacombs of a young boy’s memory as he watched an uncle’s day to day work in a funeral home or when years later spied a heron’s flight over cypress tops to fish the murky waters in a Louisiana swamp, make for good poetry fodder.

Some poems come from a place with no earthly explanation, such as the poems, In the Name of Hinterland and Sunset on the Marmara.

But it’s the bottled-up poems I love to write. The poems that have to be written. Poems that come from the heart when someone or something pulls at a heartstring.

• Language: English
• Publisher: G. Daniel Brockner
• Release date: Feb 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215591734

Book preview

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A Cypress Shotgun House

Rough sawn cypress lumber stacked and staggered

to let it breathe the hot August gulf air, known as

air-dried to prevent warp-age, green cypress’

tendency to squirm and twist while drying,

sometimes nailed up and down, vertical

with a batten to cover the space between,

referred to as board and batten, a not so

uncommon building practice, used in the Deep South

for shanties and shacks and sometimes

shotgun houses, named for their narrowly

long shape, whereby a suspect just might shoot

his or her (whichever the case may be)

shotgun through the front door down the

hall to the back bedroom, winging every

occupant in said structure causing, to say

the least, a problem for the perpetrator

not to mention the wounded souls inside –

like what happened to Marquise when his

wife, Olivia overheard two gals talking

down on the corner, real familiar like about

marquise, saying things only a wife should know

about her husband, three o’clock AM later is when

one of the gals opened the front door to

her shotgun house and was met by the blast

from Olivia’s shotgun.

A good thing cypress soaks up blood and

mixes with its own tint of red grain.

No paint necessary for the exterior because cypress

weathers to a perfect warm brownish gray on its own.

No preservative required either since cypress

is its own preservative,

being a water tree and resistant to bugs

and moisture rot, this tree grown and harvested

from the swampy waters, furbished with Spanish

Moss, amidst their bony knees jutting up from

the black water, their limbs sometimes used for

supporting yellow bellied water snakes as they

perch and dangle themselves out over the