SPOTLIGHT: this month's guest poets are Craig Tigerman and Betty Ann Whitney.  Both Craig and Betty Ann have been published in Sol Magazine almost from its beginning.  Betty Ann was our 1998 Poet Laureate.

Swirling air masses,
Cloudburst emerges,
Thunderstorm passes
Washes clean, purges
Parched landscape with wild
Abandon; love's storm
Is followed by mild
Heart-shine, sweet and warm.

Love-Tide
    by Craig Tigerman

Just as push and pull the tides,
so too the heart reveals and hides
its wishes, dreams, fears and aches;
the love it gives is the love it takes.

In holding back, it longs the more
and makes us stand in awe before
what you and I have always known:
the heart has a mind of its own.

I have been writing poems and songs for almost 35 years.  Playing my guitar, I have recorded about a dozen albums of my songs on cassette. I come from a literary and music-oriented family: Irving Berlin was my grandmother's first cousin; my father was an opera singer; my mother was an English major and her sister chaired a high school English department in Chicago.

For my own writing, however, I really have no credentials in the usual sense, just an earnest desire to craft beauty from words, expressing things my heart feels and my mind perceives.
 

Visit his web site, Tigers den at http://sol-magazine-projects.org/prodigy/craig_tigerman
 

Reflections of Reality
    by Betty Ann Whitney

Quiet city street--after dark
a man and a woman
walk slowly in the probing light of neon signs.
At first glance
I see them without stopping to consider
the sheen of their soft leather jackets
quivering the scarcely visible
substance of internal being--
this man, who loves the woman...
this woman who loves the man.
==========================
Haiku
    by Betty Ann Whitney

sunlight scattering
gentle slopes beyond the hill
vacation snapshots

Betty Ann Whitney was born and grew up in the tiny beach town of Narragansett, Rhode Island.  She is a published poet and an award winning artist who believes an inner need exists in all of us to live more deeply and fully and with greater awareness -- to know the experiences of others and to know better our own.

She says the function of the poem is not to tell, but rather allow reader participation.  It is this communicative experience she cares about and finds joy working with  --  and she says language matters even more to her than the message.

The author of a large collection of poems, some of which are published in various magazines, newspapers, and poetry publications, she is a member of New River Poets and Writers, Pasco County, Florida.

Betty Ann has been an active participant of Prodigy's Books & Writing Poetry Bulletin Board since 1992. A contributor to Sol Magazine soon after its beginning, she was Sol Magazine's 1998 Poet Laureate.

Visit her web site at: http://pages.prodigy.com/dandelionsoup