Synkroniciti is pleased to welcome back Californian poet and writer David Holper, who won our “Broken” poetry contest last year, with two poems on the miracle of love. “Superpower” reveals how children are exposed to emotional and psychological poison when their parents behave in a habitually hateful manner, in this case brought to fever pitch by his parent’s divorce and father’s subsequent remarriage. “You didn’t mean to hate yourself the way they taught you,/ but their curses proved stickier than you thought, trickier to pull off/ your skin when it was just you alone in your head…” The only way to overcome this toxicity is to learn how to love and be loved, and it takes decades. The second poem is an “Epithalamium,” a work celebrating a marriage. Stranded in a ditch off a backroad on the Olympic Peninsula, David expresses his amazement with a relationship that remains healthy and loving in the face of potential calamity. He cannot help but “wonder at the way you had driven us into disaster/ —and called upon a miracle to save us,/ thinking such marvels were as ordinary as the rain.” David’s vulnerability is enhanced by the elegance and unique imagery of his verses, which fuses the concrete with the abstract, creating powerful symbols.
Read David’s poetry in our “Family” issue, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
David Holper has published two collections of poetry, The Bridge (Sequoia Song Publications) and 64 Questions (March Street Press). His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Pilgrimage, Ruminate, Third Wednesday, First Things, Painted Bride Quarterly, and The Rambler. He has won the Barbara Curiel Award and the Jodi Stutz Prize in Toyon, the Noctua Review poetry contest, and the Rotting Post humor competition. He has published about a dozen pieces of fiction in various quarterlies, including Grand Street, the New Virginia Review, and Callaloo.
David is an emeritus professor in English at College of the Redwoods and lives in Eureka, California, where he served as the inaugural Poet Laureate. He thinks Eureka is far enough from the madness of civilization that he can still see the stars at night and hear the Canada geese calling. Please visit his website and check out his newest book, Language Lessons: A Linguistic Hejira.
