Tag Archives: Poems

Impressions of a River

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We walked on a sandbar

stepped where a blue heron stepped

the four lines where its foot fell

pressed into crackles by our weight.

 

We found warm shallows

where life abounded

mollusks the size of our palms

had pulled themselves across the floor

doodling blind, directionless lines

searching for I do not know what

 

We found a gar

dried to leather

black as driftwood in the moist sunshine

sunken eyes like leather coins

expressionless, shriveling down

to its primeval skull.

 

We found wet clay 

as deep as our knees

We mired ourselves on purpose

and struggled back out again

Pretending we were dinosaurs

Or maybe the making

of some new fossil

 

Everything on the riverbank leaves a trace

Every path is printed

 

That is until

the water rises, falls

and refreshes itself.

Each rainfall rinsing

the palette clean.

We sat on our hill and she taught me a song

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We sat on our hill and she taught me a song.

I remember her laugh when I got the words wrong,

I remember the way the grass tickled our feet,

And the flowers I tucked in her hair looked so sweet,

But I ruefully deem the dream as incomplete.

Though deep I have delved and long I have sought,

I cannot recall what she patiently taught.

 

 

 

 

Aoudads

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Aoudads are enormous, proud, and graceful animals.
The largest have sweeping beards from chest to hoof,
thick horns curling behind them,
and a critical goaty gaze
which sees you from its perch
high in the desert rocks
and seems to say, “what low thing
squints up at my grandeur?”

Their strength prevails in a climate
where lesser breeds wither.
Every image on the net
is one of these proud ruminant gods,
dwarfing a human at their side,
head upright,
held aloft by the horns
by a smiling hunter.

Something there is about a god
which drives mankind to kill it.
We suffer nothing to live above us.











Tempered

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fomented, divided, abandoned, regained
humbled
we are still children yet

what will tomorrow’s trials teach us?
who will fall?
who will flourish?
what pain will bear
what art?

life does not get easier.
we will have days even worse than this,
enough to tear our souls apart.
unquenchable anger.
unfathomable loss.
we will bend, burn, bellow
and
survive.

if we can listen we can learn

emerging
from each successive conflagration
never victorious
but wiser, truer
more grateful
aligned in the sudden extremes.











Free Space

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amazing
in this tiny place
enormous emotions

the stimulation is small
home is all we are
where nothing can touch us
safe

still we twitch
wage battles
wound one another
cry hysterically

when the chaos butterfly
flaps its wings indoors
the storm concentrates,
inescapable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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