Night fades. / A shallow breath. / Acid rain falls gently.
First hint of dawn blackbirds at song along hedgerows and
streams and where people have been I am alone
upon a hillside.
Down on my knees starlight falling through leaves
to this forest floor swept clean as a chapel.
In the distance broad places of people and the sounds
and the silences of livingness.
I’ve dug the garden rows. The seeds are in.
I wonder—Who will come to praise the beans?
I’ll sing loudly—And who will bring their melodies?
Besides the hummingbirds and bees, I mean.
Perched, a red-winged blackbird watching me,
its fencepost newly staked, bark on, topside down.
At arm’s length, rusted fence pliers bounce along a span of wire.
One. Two. Three. “Hemlock, see, twists over time—”
that’s Cunningham’s voice, “stretches the wire.
Set one post wrong-way-to and it’ll sag right there.”
Came a day I read Seamus Heaney
and with newfound pride—my own name
and that red-winged blackbird there,
down Vernon River way.
Seamus Heaney wrote a fabulous poem titled St. Kevin and the Blackbird.
.
Standing. Alone.
A yellow sky. A shudder, grind
And hesitation of the earth.
Below, black seas heave and sigh
Against a scar of land.
Night. Yellow sky remains.
Arc and flicker.
I breathe. Night fades.
A shallow breath.
Acid rain falls gently.
Pangaea: Proto-continent existing about 375 million years ago eventually breaking into two continental masses, Gondwana & Laurasia. Gondwana: made up of areas now Africa, most of Australia, India, South America & Antarctica. Laurasia: North America, Greenland, Europe & Asia north of the Himalayas.
I put myself there, at the sundering.
Published in: “souls arriving” 2006: “Letter to the White Imbongi” 2013: “3201 e’s” 2018
see-sawn summers
mother’s broom
autumn figures
sylvan moon
winter settles
lean and dusky
spring rains
fiddleheads
a-busking
Fiddleheads are the young curled fronds of some ferns.
Published in: “souls arriving” 2006: “Letter to the White Imbongi” 2013
Smouldering moon over fallen dark embers—
fragments rising in corkscrew red-gold rhythms
Midsummer, traditionally June 24th.
Let me rest among these giant souls that stand
where trees once stood.
Here, greens break into blacky-blues and dragonflies
and dusts of beetle dung grow old withal.
Let me rest among the salmonberry and the tumblewood
of cotton, ash and hemlock, fir and cedar.
And let the wind stir of pine above the fall reawaken me
in early greens and sapling dress, anon.
This poem is an allegory. Published in: “souls arriving” 2006 as title “Tumblewood”: “Between Music and Dance” 2013: “Letter to the White Imbongi” 2013: “The Footprint Press” 2014: “3201 e’s” 2018.
Still here, my friend, not much to tell.
Winter came, wearied, went.
Spring—hurried skies, or sun or rain.
Hot summer days, hot sleepless nights.
Fall was fresher, raked what fell.
Another year. Mostly well.
Published in: “3201 e’s” 2018 as “Not much to tell”
I see snowflakes in my headlights
Just one or two—and now a few.
They come dancing from the darkness.
They fly twirling out of view.
Published in: “Letter to the White Imbongi” 2013