The changing seasons always seem to beg for conciseness. And it is National Poetry day.
Seasons are not rounds
Each reflecting the other
Then why these same sighs?
Fall is upon us
Old winter waits patiently
Counting cricket calls
Bees make love
To the last blossoms
Of summer
I
They say time is a river
You can never step in twice
In the same place
But I know you can
If you wait long enough
Between steps
If you wait until it’s unrecognizable
Until you step on a dry patch of grass
Crunching underfoot just so
Until you taste the clay the color of dreams
Until you feel the sweat making canyons
In the soil on your forearm
Under the seeping sun
Unfiltered by knowing
I say you can, by being still and listening
To the strangely placid screaming
Of cicadas
Dying away into the night
II
Among the ghosts I saw
In a strange and fitful mirror
A young man, lean and early,
Sunlight stranded in his hair
Skin the color of baked earth
Heart like pierced leather
Eyes berserk with possibility
I saw myself, long ago
A good one from We Drink because We’re Poets. Here’s my take:
Blustering grey clouds
No cover for the weary
Winter eyes shiver
In leaps dawn
Like impetuous whimsey
All dressed in fiery red
Eyes burning with mad ambition
A pox on sleep!
The fawning dead
Drifting endlessly into
Oblivion
Not for us!
Up like buttercups
Like spiky woven thistles
Up toward the solar apogee
Until finally, inevitably,
The long graceless glide
Begins again
In slips dusk
All dusky
I’m old, don’t start with me
Don’t talk of deadlines
Or complain about the occasional
Twitch of middle age
There are people I know,
Dearly beloved,
Who worry that death will take them
Before their great work is done
Others who panic
Thinking their great work,
Having taken place in irascible youth,
Will fade without recognition
Or that the world, God forbid,
And all its minions,
Might come to misconstrue
Their contribution, mistaking it for exuberance.
As for me, it could happen
That I’m done before I die,
Or otherwise
Timing, they say, is everything.
exiles child 