Poetry
An August Midnight I A shaded lamp and a waving blind, And the beat of a clock from a distant floor: On this scene enter — winged, horned, and spined — A longlegs, a moth, …
Cicada Cycle I. The Dream Seventeen years you sleep: unseen, burrowed, buried, deep in a dream of your becoming. Never hurried, exactly on time, resurrected out of your tomb you climb. II. Cicada Fire-eyed cicada: …
Climate Change It is the great sigh of our still blue marble: Each new storm a gasp for air, a crying out from the rivers of truth that are poisoning our political seas. Who makes …
APGAR When you were born, you didn’t make a sound until they put you on the warming table, cold chick, bluish and mute. The reddened gowns the nurses wore were soaked as in some fable …
Ritual Ritual is firm where life is fickle, Steps in, hands us formula for hurt, Things to do: cross ourselves, stand, bow. There are no words, we protest, but somehow Ritual instructs us what to …
The First Spark One girl and one boy: just talking, then falling. Suddenly, her dorm room feels too small, two souls peeled clean and raw, like copper wires stripped, electricity whipping silent sparks, dancing and …
July 5th All the flag-clad oohs and ahhs fizzle just past midnight, a slight singe of burn hovering over today: patriotic hangover with stars and stripes banging about in brains that never OK’d reciting names …
The American Soldier A Picture from the Life To serve with love, And shed your blood, Approved may be above, But here below (Example shew,) ’Tis dangerous to be good. — Lord Oxford Deep in …
June I gazed upon the glorious sky And the green mountains round, And thought that when I came to lie At rest within the ground, ’Twere pleasant, that in flowery June, When brooks send up …
True Love at Seventy is passion honed by anticipation of coming despair and a certain prayer one of us will bid for one day more or one warm morning or just one shared moment of …
Geometry Above the lake, the little birds flit in shallow sine waves, skimming low to catch the mayfly hatch, and leaving cold, concentric rings where beaks and wingtips kiss the glass. The morning light is …
Dawns Each dawn is an amazement. From the subterranean corridors of night, my slippery crags and sucking mudslides, desperate scrambles, floundering through snow, wallowing waist-deep through murky waters. Your maze of unlit streets, criss-crossing freeways, …
Military Funeral The muffled roll of drums, the folded flag; Three volleys from bolt-actions, sharp and crisp; The clink of cartridge casings, and a wisp Of bluish smoke. Then Taps begins its drag Of lengthened …
Under the Willows May is a pious fraud of the almanac. A ghastly parody of real Spring Shaped out of snow and breathed with eastern wind; Or if, o’er-confident, she trust the date, And, with …
The Peace Treaty My neighbor’s cow has got across The green creek down below, She’s on my island, eating grass That I had planned to mow. And so I sit and watch her graze, And …
The Resistance Their backs bent double and their heads kept low, the seedling maples infiltrate the row. A tyrant with a keen idea of order, I slaughter the insurgents at the border, scuffle and slash …