Tags
Aspen Trees, frost, hoar frost, Poems, Poetry, Rime, Winter, Winter poem
The consolation of cold:
Rime on the branches,
Aspen lifting their arms
To worship the day.
Winter Rime
21 Wednesday Feb 2018
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Tag Archives: Poetry
The Passing of Billy Graham
21 Wednesday Feb 2018
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The aspen is clothed,
Its limbs reach toward heaven
Alight with rime and worship:
A great one has passed
At ninety nine years–
The lives that are touched
At ninety nine years–
Mine, my grandfather’s,
The time overlaps,
spreads over the landscape
So that all are touched,
All are clothed.
It is zero today,
And I wanted to write
That hell is cold–
Until I saw the aspen
Clothed in hoar frost.
All the world has become
The aspen, outlined in ice.
Will I Wake In Spring?
20 Tuesday Feb 2018
Posted in Uncategorized
I said the aspen was naked,
But maybe it’s me that’s naked.
The older I get,
The more naked I feel,
Like the aspen stripped by winter.
Its bare limbs standing still
In the fog, are they my limbs?
How terrifying!
How vulnerable!
How lonely!
Will it wake in spring?
Will I wake in spring?
Synchronicity: The Herd
02 Tuesday May 2017
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We must move together,
One mind, one soul,
One body, one purpose,
Says the herd.
We’ll bend our necks
To the ground,
Bite off blades of grass,
Like so: the Mustang,
The palomino mare,
The old sorrel gelding.
See how our heads line up?
Front, right legs forward,
One ear to the herd,
The other to the sky,
And bird sound:
The high pitch
Of the kildeer,
nesting in grass nearby,
The chattering of the geese,
The barn swallows,
returned to their nests,
Above our stalls.
We hear their song,
A composition,
Carried by the wind,
Through pine,
Through aspen,
Through crocus
And snowdrops.
We must move together,
One mind, one soul,
One body, one purpose,
Says the herd.
Flying Things
26 Wednesday Apr 2017
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1.
Under the wings of Canada Geese,
Rushed time:
Moments we wept
In our loss,
Wept in our fear,
Abandoned each other.
I stood alone,
Amid an ocean of dry leaves,
As the sky flew by in freedom,
And helplessness.
2.
How can I forget
That great yellow butterfly,
As big as a barn swallow?
It hovered around you,
Like a message
You wouldn’t hear.
Finally, it landed on your bare shoulder,
As you stopped work,
Leaned against your shovel,
Encircled of frail spirit,
And our children,
Chasing, laughing around you.
While I, woman in flight,
Watched silently from the back door,
Knowing I was letting you go.
The Way
28 Saturday Jan 2017
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Tags
Aspen Trees, Hope, Lilacs, Loss, Mt Spokane, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Ponderosa Pine, Yearning
The way the sun lit the branches of the aspen,
Traced the snow-lined needles of the Ponderosa,
Shone off each blade of grass in the dry circle
underneath that great pine, surrounded by snow.
I said, the way, as if it would lead to a thought,
But, in fact, it leads to fog, or the lifting of it,
Near the tiny Lilac bushes,
And, further still, across the blanket of snow–
A blanket that someone lay upon,
But not under, leaving an impression of a body,
The soft parts, blown away
From the crisp, frozen parts.
Look further still, through the lifting,
You’ll see the great Spokane Mountain,
And all the trees and houses
Which lead from here to there.
For a moment, you may think you can touch it,
Stretch, reach out your hand,
Trace your fingertips along its lonely edges,
And lift it into your arms.
What Is A Poem
03 Tuesday Jan 2017
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Tags
Mozart, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Silence, Song and Poetry, What is a Poem
The music is not in the notes, but the silence between.
–Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
2.
Even the world’s silence sings out to us,
The tension of what will come,
Always greater than what is.
Yes, a poem is a song,
Because everything,
Everything,
Is music.
The Coldest War
03 Tuesday Jan 2017
Posted in Uncategorized
Capo 3 (Am, Em, G, C)
His letter arrived on January Two,
He said the British were coming, but the snow came, too,
And they didn’t have food, and they didn’t have shoes,
He wanted to be home, but had to stay through.
Chorus:
Dan, Dan, come home to me if you can.
Leaving now won’t make you less of a man.
Come home to me now, if you can.
Come home to me now, if you can.
Soldiers were buried like sheep in the snow,
They were almost smothered by the storm.
The salt water froze, so the boats stood still,
And there wasn’t an escape from that wintry hell.
Chorus.
By the time my words arrived, Dan was already gone.
He didn’t have a chance to heed my sweet begging song.
And, the storm went its way, as if it hadn’t ever come,
And the world went on and on.
Dan, Dan, you’ll always be my sweet lovin’ man.
You’d have come to me if you’d had the chance,
But the world had other plans.
Yes, the world had other plans.
Where Are You Beautiful: A Song
31 Saturday Dec 2016
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Fingerpick C, G, Am, F repeat
Who are you,
And where are you beautiful.
Where’s your song,
That you must sing?
Lose yourself,
In all that is beautiful,
What’s torn apart,
What’s crumbling.
What’s Crumbling?
Improvise
Let me hear
Your sweet song.
What makes you cry?
What sets you free?
It’s you and me
On the edge of losing
All we have,
To eternity–
To eternity.
Improvise
Tell me now,
Where are you beautiful.
What makes you cry?
What makes you sing?
What is a Poem?
27 Tuesday Dec 2016
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Tags
1.
Let’s be honest,
No one cares how your poem
Is a reflection of you.
They care how it is
A reflection of them.
And when I say no one,
I mean me.
And you.
Song of the Chickadee
23 Friday Dec 2016
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There’s a rule among birds,
If it’s singing, it can’t be killing,
Which may, or may not, be true,
Except for the family of plump chickadees,
Who wintered beneath our cedar arch.
With their black caps and gray-backed wings,
They flitted from rail, to pan, to chair, to deck,
To aspen perch, peeking in at us,
Until I plucked my first A minor–
The 3rd and 5th string,
A melancholy chord found in most songs,
Even the chickadees’, it turns out,
When they hear you sing.
What is Aleppo?
15 Thursday Dec 2016
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“We didn’t want anything else but freedom.
This world doesn’t like freedom.”
Abdulkafi Alhamdo, Professor of English, Last Call from Aleppo
What is Aleppo?
All that it was, or dreamed to be,
In rubble. Have you seen rubble?
It’s what hope looks like when it’s collapsed,
Reduced to broken chunks of asphalt
And twisted, distorted beams of rebar.
It’s brown. Not dark brown, but light brown,
The color of dust.
There is no truth, but suffering,
And the realization no help is coming–
No haloed army, no golden trumpets,
No white horses or heroes.
The choices you made,
In your heart of hearts,
Choice, like stone in your heart,
That is Aleppo now–
Stone in your heart.
The Cold That is Loneliness
15 Thursday Dec 2016
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The cold that is loneliness–
Ice, snow, hunger.
Did we care
The days had shortened?
Dark mornings,
Dark afternoons,
We stumbled, it’s true,
But don’t we all stumble,
Slide on the ice–
A dangerous toboggan
Of metal and glass and rubber
Just sliding,
sliding, sliding.
Where will it stop–
Against a sign, a bank of snow,
An oncoming car?
We turn the wheel
Left, then right, then left
And tap on the brakes,
Hoping they will catch
Onto something solid.
My love, turns out
You were the solid thing
On which I caught.
Beautiful Mustang
21 Thursday Jan 2016
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Tags
Beaty's Butte, Beautiful Girl, Beautiful Mustang, Horse, Horse Poems, Horses, Mustang, mustang poems, mustangs, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Wild Horse Poetry, Wild Horses
Beautiful Mustang
Beaty’s Butte, Oregon 2007
Some things survive
Despite capture,
Despite fear.
Like memory,
How it felt
To take those first
Feeble, free steps,
Then stretch your neck
Toward breasts,
And the reward
Of warm milk.
The world was starving,
But some things survived,
Like the smell of sage
When your bodies
Lay down at night
And crushed the stems.
You dreamt of flight,
On strong legs;
You dreamt of rest,
Under the mahogany’s shade.
Some things survived,
Like the smell
Of your dam’s fur in rain,
The smell of her sweat.
The sound of her separation
survived, too,
The calling back and forth
From pen to pen,
Your first real lesson
On what it’s like
To be loved.
That way.
In the way
Of the terrible missing.
Some things survive,
Despite capture,
Despite fear.
Like memory.
Connection
17 Thursday Dec 2015
Posted in Uncategorized
Sit deep, deep in the saddle,
Your ankle, hip, and shoulder
A line, that dissects some star
And continues past,
“Where does space end,”
The question your teacher asked
In the fifth grade.
Which is to say, it never ends,
And I can’t help thinking,
I don’t either,
Nor does this horse,
Engulfed in her own heat,
Evaporating into the cold air
Of another December.
What is it about two souls
That makes the one feel alive,
Connected, two dots, through which
A line extends forever,
Pierces a fabric, so thin,
We were together all along,
Though we didn’t know.
Light In a Black Hole
03 Thursday Sep 2015
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Tags
Black Hole, Event Horizon, Germany, Ghandi, Greece, Heaven, Hell, Hope, Iraq, Italy, Light, Love, Milky Way, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Refugees, Souls, Spirits, Supermassive Black Hole, Syria, Turkey
In the center of the Milky Way,
Exists a black hole
Equal to 4.3 million suns.
Its gravity so strong,
There is no light.
We stand on the edge,
An event horizon,
Or, the point of no return,
As refugees push out
And we argue about definitions.
Mothers and fathers,
Children,
Who dream of a good Germany,
A Europe with jobs and new homes.
They launch into black holes:
The Aegean Sea,
The Dark Sea,
Floating back in waves,
Absent of light.
We wonder at this hell,
A place of suffering,
And hope for something beyond,
A better place
Where there is love,
There is light,
Light in a Black Hole.
Norway: Henrik Ibsen
10 Monday Aug 2015
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Tags
Enemy of the People, Henrik Ibsen, Norway, Poem, Poems, Poetry
“Let me tell you–that the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.”
Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People, Dr. Stockmann’s last words.
Henrik Ibsen Skien
Henrick, Enrique, they say, HenReek.
The Henrik of Ghosts and A Doll’s House,
And Enemy of the People.
In Norway, he’s everywhere:
The looming statue in Skien
Framed by the bay,
And the old church
With its two sky-high spires,
towering above the ash-built town.
He refused to return there.
His ending, instead, Oslo,
Where the palace street
Bears his name.
The false doctrine that is the masses
Adore him, bend and kiss
The floorboards of his childhood home.
The compact majority, unwilling
To stand most alone,
More like Peter than the crazed doctor,
United in their fear,
But willing to tread anonymously
The now hollow path,
And bask in its echoes.
The Barn Swallows, Drowned In the Trough
29 Wednesday Jul 2015
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Tags
Barn Swallows, Bird Drowning, Birds, Death, Poem, Poems, Poetry, Spiders, Swallows
I can’t bring death to a world
Where everything dies.
Not even a spider in the front eve,
Its shadow, at night, a good five inches.
It scares the hell out of me,
But how can I fault her,
For dropping down, thread by thread,
And spinning her web.
I can’t add her death
To a world where everything dies.
And yet, I pulled two dead barn swallows
From the galvanized trough by the barn.
I regret, the shallow Victorian bird bath
I wouldn’t purchase, for fear
I’d lure the precious birds to our cat.
Despite trying to avoid bringing death,
It came anyway,
To a world where everything dies.
For Bernie
28 Tuesday Jul 2015
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Tags
Aging, Breast Cancer, Cancer, Death, Death Poems, Dirge Without Music, Edna St Vincent Millay, Gardens, Poem, Poems, Poetry, prostate cancer, Shadow of Death
The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love–
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
(Dirge Without Music, Edna St. Vincent Millay)
The Fall came in shadows,
The poetry,
Cancers of breast and prostate,
The tumor in the child’s lung,
By December it emerged
Another way, unpredicted,
Because who can predict death?
Fierce and final,
I would say it ravished,
But that would imply he may have lived.
And he didn’t.
What’s the word for being all gone,
The home you built, inhabited by strangers,
Growing cucumbers and tomatoes
In the garden you put away?
Did you think you’d see April,
The planting of the seeds?
Or July, with its harvest?
New hands take up old work,
And so, it goes on without us.
After a short time, even memory,
Struggles to keep us alive.
The Number of Our Days
29 Friday May 2015
Posted in Uncategorized
From our first breath,
Straight from the womb,
We average twenty five thousand
Nine hundred fifteen days,
Of welcoming the sun,
Falling asleep under the moon.
You can buy a car for that much,
But it won’t have leather,
Or a back-up camera,
Or, probably GPS.
His doctor said, two and half years,
The average in late stage prostate cancer,
But I like to think,
Nine hundred twelve and a half days.
Nine hundred twelve times
To welcome the sun,
Nine hundred twelve times
To fall asleep under the moon
And a half day left over,
To dream about both.
Bits of Poetry 