Are there watchers in the sky?
Do they see us, wake us from dreams
and mark with hope the wonder
that we might now remember
time-travelers of the past?
Wait! they somehow seem to say.
Wait! we will come back someday.
April themes elude me
My thoughts are all away
I know that April’s greening
And blue light tints the sky
Waiting now impatient
May is already preening
Across the stage she flaunts
Her flowers for all to see
Then June, upstaging, will appear
Thus it goes, on and on each year
Yet I find it quite enchanting
This April in greening time
Summer’s song is silent
Its music waits
Although this show
Goes on each year
It’s great to see
Each month appear
Miles and miles
Of rock and dried ashes
Roll across the desert floor
Far away the rounded cone
Testifies to a hot, boiling past
The thought
That fountained
Northern lights
Into the mind
From some far realm
(I tried to snare
With a net of fragile words)
Vanished in a shower of iridescence.
Dimension-denying
Like a crystal rainbow
Dissolving into glass rain
The colors fell,
Tone-splintering at earth’s touch,
Fragmentize a million million times.
Silken rivers ran
In silver white streams
Slender ribbons fjording
The flower-fired banks
Truth stands beside them
Clothed in robe of revealing light
But fear drags
At their hungry eyes
And their heads are turned away
Mournful, tragic figures
Gazing into emptiness
Silken rivers
In silver white streams
Slender ribbons fjording
The flower-fired banks
Safari into the Soul Country
The path of power answers all the call
The path is oh so short
Of certain death
The self-deceived desire to lead
Lures righteous men
from honored goals
To a corrupted end
For within its core
Glory hides the tainted seed
The world laments slowly
That deep grave where
Conquerors all must sleep.
In my memory
There’s a place at river’s bend
Where willows bow low
Over deep, bright cold water’s edge
Why it’s there, I do not know.
The new poets
Employ not rhyme
And barely discernible rhythms.
They tell it like it is
Sometimes, only sometimes
Truth flares
Like hydrogen light.
The new poets sling
Deadly arrows
Straight to the bull’s eye.
When more relaxed,
They paint canvases of dark, light
With colors hot, bold or both.
Through intellectual concepts
They lead our thoughts
Bring insight
That can break a heart
Or twist a stomach in horror.
In language plain or rare
As the case may be
Through intellectual concepts
They lead our thought along
Perception’s path
Draw us with them
Into new realms
Expand experience.
Is that not enough?
But where is the music?
No one to take note
Of your passing
It was a gentle wind
Striking softly at the window
As throwing
Handsful of marshmallows
Wind-gusted
We wandered
In frozen gardens
Winter trees
Ice-crystalled
And silvered
Dazzled beneath
The chill moon’s
Eerie heaven
Smiling faces
Candlelit and firelit
Eyes beaming
With happiness
But it came time
To say farewell
We went off
Into the wind-gusted
Twilight newly-wed
And fragile
As blown glass