Summer dies reluctantly
Last call for crickets
Singing halfheartedly
Certainty comes only of ignorance
In such wilderness as this
Each hand grasps another
Until it all tumbles in unison
Ah, the carnage
In the style of exiles
So self-consciously
We sail on the edge of winter
Red sky over Homs
A faint riffle, a stirring
Of late summer breeze
Among the searing flesh
And the fly benighted airs
A brief hope of relief
From the deadly heat.
Meanwhile, over Damascus
The whiff of colonial pasts
This poem is in response to prompt #18, “losing control,” by Mindlovemisery.
Walking the forest path
Sunlight glittering
Rain spattered leaves
Clouds gracing a sky like silk
Suede logs bounding
Splat! On my butt
Mother nature is such a card
Once upon a dreaming green
By the ocean’s clapping heart
Swayed full with thunder wonder
I saw the river flowing
Change course, dry up
Make islands, golden dreams
Drain fields, ambitions
Unmitigated, oblivious
Winging onward
Like crabgrass, Like dirt
Unbounded
Like winds unhinged
No rhythm so replete as days
Each different, all unchanging
Grief and joy alike
Turn to dross, cheap decoration
You, agent of emptiness, why
This running choice, this still
Cunning, this rumination
Of not ending, not beginning?
I read the universe arose from nothing,
So gone, so not
I try to keep it from slipping shut,
A splendid churl, eyes blinking
Surfing the faint, tireless breeze
Music from a distant park
The last half-hearted song
Of the sparrow
Fireflies like paper lanterns
In a far-away twilight
Long before conditioned air
In the hot, moist summer
Even clocks stopped running,
Too slow to mark
The interminable hours,
The memories, the sweat
Whole eternities passed
In the too long days
Of the too short summers
So entirely gone
There is no stylus so precise
As to record the passage of a soul
From one moment to the next
exiles child 