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Wake
Such a miracle:
the first steps of the cormorant’s flight
taken over water.
That first step heavy,
the second lighter,
and the third scarcely a paint brush
pocking the waves.
The need to take flight
lies deep within me.
Like a ship at sea,
or a seabird over the waves,
I will leave white water in my wake
to prove that I was here,
for a little while,
but have now gone.
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Geese
Late last night, high above the house
in the sky’s giant highway,
geese flew overhead, honking.
I pinpointed their calls
leaning back, straining my neck,
and for a moment there were no stars,
just a feathered blackness blanking
the Big Dipper as it hung in the sky.
Harbingers, bringers of spring,
those Canadian geese erased
selected stars and left me breathless,
overwhelmed by so many memories
as they carved their sky path
far above my head.
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Spring
Slow going
this snow going,
but at least
it isn’t snowing.
Snow forecast
on the weather show,
but we all know
it cannot last,
now the equinox
is past.
With a roll of drums
Easter comes,
but friends and family
stay away.
So all alone
and safe at home
we’ll spend
our Easter day.
Everybody understands
how often we must
wash our hands.
Don’t go unmasked,
even when asked,
and all our friends
must safely stay
at least six feet away.
Comment: I just received this poem as a memory on Facebook. Interesting. I remember writing it, online, a year ago today, and what a fun time I had. Here’s the link to the video. I loved being involved in the creative experience. It was my first poetry video. I do hope you like it.
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A Farewell to Charms
Early tomorrow, my love, you’ll fly away.
Today, you’ll walk around the Beaver Pond
where red and yellow leaves abound. A thin grey
webbing garlands one dead tree. I’m not too fond
of tent worms. I hate them when they swing
from low branches. Give me a fresh green frond
caught by the morning sun in early spring
or else bright autumn leaves so soon to fall.
I love American Goldfinches when they sing
that last departing song. I love most of all
those occasional visitors: do you recall that bright
blue Indigo Bunting with his “I’m-a-lost-bird” call?
The hunting hawks give everyone a fright.
They perch on top of a garden tree
then step off into space to claw-first alight
on some poor songbird trilling away, quite free
from fear, his unfinished symphony of song.
It’s getting late, my love. You walk towards me
out of the woods. I’ll end this poem with a plea:
don’t forget me … and don’t stay away too long.
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Fundy
Salt on the sea wind sifts raucous gulls in packs,
breeze beneath wings, searching for something
to scavenge. Seaweed. The tidemark filled with
longing. A grey sea crests and rises. Staring eyes:
stark simplicity of that seal’s head filling the bay.
Next day, his body stretched dead on the beach.
The river runs rocky beneath the covered bridge.
Campers have created first nation’s rock people,
heaping stone upon stone. At low tide, on the dried
river bed, there is no easy way to say no. White foam
horses stamp and foam in the sea farrier’s forge. Cold
winds blow at Cape Enrage. Wolfe Point sees late
gales transform the beach: the sandbar carved:
a Thanksgiving turkey, stripped to bare rib bone.
Dead birds sacrificed so I can walk here in comfort,
my anorak stuffed with their plundered plumage.
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Mountain Ash
Honey sweet bark drilled by beaks
bleeds the rowan’s life away.
Who do we kill: bird or tree?
Decision made, the sap-suckers,
claws trapped in sackcloth, fluff
their feathers, leave their feast.
Red beads on the mountain ash:
a rosary of bright berries.
Bitter on the tongue, sunset’s
first flourish tinting my dream.
Midnight gnaws at the moon.
Its white skull drifts, a stone knife,
sharpened, in the sky’s iron hand.
At shadowed garden’s shallow
edge, the sorbus aucuparia bends,
its spirit walking night’s waters.
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Passerines
Light dances and reduces spring’s snow.
Tiny white islands float in a rising tide of green.
The late spring sun carves charcoal lines of shadow.
What remains of the winter is no longer smooth,
but dimpled and wrinkled,
glowing with a million tiny dots of color.
Dew point: occasional snowflakes
float down — feathered parachutes.
Dots of refracted sunshine spin out from the sun-
powered crystals that turn in my window.
They cut through the heavy air that the hyacinths
weight with their redolence.
The soft white flowers of the cyclamen
respond to the dancing points of light,
the curved edges of its leaves soak up the sun.
Returning passerines jostle and shove,
greedy to approach the feeder.
They are random, like thoughts,
flighty, and totally untamable.
Grosbeaks
Light dances and reduces spring’s snow.
Tiny white islands float in a rising tide of green.
The late spring sun carves charcoal lines of shadow.
What remains of the winter is no longer smooth,
but dimpled and wrinkled,
glowing with a million tiny dots of color.
Dew point: occasional snowflakes
float down — feathered parachutes.
Dots of refracted sunshine spin out from the sun-
powered crystals that turn in my window.
They cut through the heavy air that the hyacinths
weight with their redolence.
The soft white flowers of the cyclamen
respond to the dancing points of light,
the curved edges of its leaves soak up the sun.
Grosbeaks, greedy for sunflower seeds,
jostle, shove, and push, to establish
their pecking order at the picnic table.
They are random, like thoughts,
flighty, and totally untamable.
Comment: What’s in a name? Change the birds and the poem changes. The same poem? Or is it? Does only the title change? I’ll let you decide. Do you have a preference? Please tell me.
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Sharp-Shin
She surveys her empire
from our back porch
steps into space
plunges her body’s weight
into fragile air.
A feathered arrow,
she makes contact, feet first,
bowling the unsuspecting robin
over on the ground.
His shrill shriek emerges
from a beak shredding failing air.
The hawk’s claws clench.
Her victim’s movements weaken,
eyes gaze into darkness.
One final spasm,
a last quick twitch,
and the robin is gone,
one wing dragging,
borne skywards
in the hawk’s claws.
Aubade
Fluffed up in their look-out points,
the birds in the garden complain of the cold
with short, sharp calls.
A life of ease they seem to live,
but when the mercury descends and water freezes
icy blinds inside our window panes and snow-
squalls bluster in from north and west,
who knows what’s best for those poor birds?
Crows, aloft in their crow’s nest spars,
sailing snow’s seas,
steadfast in their skippering of wind-bent trees
don’t seem to suffer so much.
This Arctic cold is such
that neither man nor beast can love it,
crouched close to whatever warmth there is,
shivering in the wind’s cold touch.
Driving home from the hospital,
bullied by fierce winds on a snow-packed road,
I dream as I drive.
I envision a past that never was,
a future that may never be.
As I hibernate in that past,
last summer’s flowers flourish in my mind.
The car skids into a snow bank
and my world shakes in shock.
A thirty wheeler rumbles by:
there are so many ways to die.
Dark is her Shop
I buy two liters of white mescal, cheap and rough,
without the second brewing: fire water, not smooth.
Two liters: she sells them in an old Coke bottle
she’ll seal with cellophane, and a rubber band.
Six worms I buy. Bedraggled fighters dragging
smoky trails as they plummet through a yellow sea.
In the shop next door I buy poinsettias.
When I get home, I put them in a vase
and watch them, red-eyed, watching me.
Bloodstains scratching a white-washed wall.
Misshapen gems in a ceramic prison, their beauty
breaks me down: a fragmented world, decimated
words, metaphors born from worms and mescal.
The eyes I see are not eyes because I see them:
they are eyes because … twin brown ovals …
they watch me as they float in a liquid mirror
within the upraised glass held by my hand.
Outside, beyond the balcony,
sun -blood melts like sealing wax.
The bougainvillea strains sharp stains
through a lonesome slice of sunlight
giving birth to flamboyán and tulipán.
My lemon tree leans over to listen.
Glistening pearls of dew embellish
its morning throat. Christmas decorations
these postage-stamp minstrels, thronging
each branch, filling me with song.
Butterflies, winged flakes of archaic paint,
flutter from temple walls leaving them barren.
Church towers, strong when terra firma shakes,
quiver insubstantial. Mescal melts the morning,
a miracle, this quiver of shimmering air.
rogermoorepoet 