Unsung Songs

Unsung songs won’t
whistle in the wind
and unsung poems stick in my throat.

If I can’t sing
let cicada and cricket
sing my homage to wind and rain and sun.
Let their songs circle the world
and echo back to me.

Why should I try to sing?
Isn’t it enough
that cicada and cricket consent
to sing for me?

Witness

...and behold, the bush burned with fire,
and the bush was not consumed.
—Exodus 3:2—

on the best day never
the silent songbird sang
the blossomless thorn bush
waxed red and yellow
and the starless moonless sky lit up

I wasn't there

but

I want to tell you : it was radiant

No Escape

Light rises into being;
and windsong and children’s laughter
rise into light.

Across the street
children swat a ball
and run and yell
laughing.

I was also a child
of light and laughter,
unfraught days
and soft summer nights
of lilac and honeysuckle.

Outside my window
trees reach out
maybe in thankfulness.
Do they remember their
saplinghood,
struggling up for light,
down for sustenance?

A slim blond child runs by,
ponytail bouncing.
I want her to celebrate.
I want her to understand:
Life is incurable.

The Rising and Falling Light

the moon rises
into being
and beyond all silence
at the edge of night
wind soars into song
and dances past
my deep blue dreamstreet

every dawn
every dusk
in my shining silver world:

promise and remorse
the singing wind
and the rising and falling light

This Bright Blue Sunday

I moped
about the yard deploring
the gnarled dead honey locust branch
the dying maple
and that sandy spot where nothing grows

but the air is gravid with lassitude and lust
and suddenly a mottled Cooper’s hawk snatches
a robin in mid-flight
my God
it’s nature unDisneyfied
in my own backyard

the horizon lies indistinct
at the end or beginning
of something

oh let me be blue
let me mope about deploring
the end or beginning
of whatever
it has to be
this bright blue Sunday

Heavy Weather

Darkness looms
and soon it’s heavy weather.

Let storm clouds rumble in,
raise hell with my composure,

pound ears and head and chest,
shake my standing in the world.

Here I am
planted in certainty,

so how could a widdershins wind
turn me around and upside down

and shake from my tumbling
all I dread to know?