Haiku
Now the snow has come
the thrush in the thorn bush sings
with such tenderness
Will and Testament
When I lie down
to die
I will
that it be
on a hillside so remote
that the only beings
that find me
are the coyote the magpie the worm
the bee roving
to create wild honey
and should
in a distant time
some human
encounter my parenthesis
he read in that calligraphy
only
a testament
of my love for you
and the liberty
I stole
from your fiercest
embrace.
Ancestors
The autumn leaves
drift by my window
and I have a name
for each of them
Eve Cain
the forbearers
of this malignancy
I hold so dear
Autumn leaves
of red and gold
bone meal and mulch
tooth and hunger
for next year’s poppies
An Example
Frank lived
on practically nothing breathing the air freely writing gaunt poetry which he sold by the line to certain publications and pointed political analyses to others making enough to purchase what food he couldn’t grow cooking and heating by wood in his cabin culling fallen trees and branches from the nearby federal lands hauling it all out to his old crosscut his personal parkland spreading with time.
His clothes and boots from the Salvation Army he took his coffee black in the café to which he daily walked to read for hours the newspapers and to converse with his neighbors should they care to and so cupped a small flame against the windstorm of America.
A smile
I stretch out on a carpet
idly studying the weave
when in a field of red and gold
a capricious thread of blue
stops my heart
and I sense a shy hello
from a girl in Persia
a hundred years ago
A hundred years ago
I rolled onto my back
and felt my smile decay
the lark that leapt from my heart
circled slowly back to earth
the gentle smile so well intended
is long rotted in the grave
!
your smile
makes me
smile