Tag Archives: aging

Insignificance

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I read great poets, great beacons,
Their eyes so keen,
Their voices clear as sunlight
With a winter slant, harsh,
But welcome all the same.

Personally,
I’ve grown used to irrelevance,
Come to prefer it.
My history of judgment
Is spotty, at best
My place in the grand confusion
Of existence
Is in the chorus,
Oblivious,
One small voice
Bleating among many,
One fading light
In the great kaleidoscope,
Whispering, more than declaiming,
Twinkling, more than illuminating.

But it’s me, inaudible at times,
Barely discernable,
Me

A tanka for winter

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Bitter snow
A handful of vagrant seeds
Juncos all alight with hunger
In the teapot
Leaves grow cold

An autumn haiku

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Fall comes upon us
All gaudy and draped in red
Like yesterday’s blood

Blood and soil

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Sometimes I think the land,
the kind of soil,
the trees, the vining shrubs,
the water and what swims in it,
what crawls out of it,
these things fill veins
with a stronger wine
than mere genetics.

Feet of clay, they say.
Not much clay in these
Northern parts,
all sand and gravel
pushed and mangled down by
ancient ice,
time after time
until all memory is gone.

You’d think such persistence
would make smooth,
but all I know is raw
and open,
like yesterdays.

How we were then

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In those dim grassy
harp-infused summers, we
longed for gray days
in redemption of living well,
the irony cloaked in
naïve dissolution.

We rejected willy-nilly
all that was pre-primed, packaged,
brightly colored.

For us, the rough edge, the ill-fit,
the soiled and discarded,
dust-blown cowboys
blues men smelling of urine
pawn shops, dives,

anything
dismissed and mistreated,
we imagined our own.

How we trotted out our patchy
lives, how we dwindled in our
constructed agony,
tethered all along
to a safe and sorry fate
we could not quite discard!

Is it a kind of hubris
to deny good fortune?

Or is it mere antithesis,
the dark side of a moon
unworthy of its borrowed shine?