A New Moment

 Birthday Goals for the 78th Year

October 29

Write more poetry

Be calm and find beauty

Expand the vast 

Wherein salvation

See shadow

And trust the mirror 

Nurture kindness and 

Don’t stray 

Call to love

Call to forgiving

See the infinite 

In a spiderweb’s tenacity

In the far stars in the Milky Way 

It is nine minutes after 

Midnight

In my allotted new year.

October 30

12:09 am

Resolve in Twilight

Resolution and memory:

She refused to go outside on ice-covered pathways, snows lovely but not be be navigated,

She withered in the starts & stops of approaching spring, 

Fretting in summertime about the growing,

And only 

Settling into winter 

After her red-orange autumns

Fade into 

What carries from the prairie:

The incessant search

For great opening spaces, where 

Love lives

Amid all balance. 

Everything I’m Taught

 

Get in the ditch when the plains sky gets green

Let your night vision click in 

Listen to the bullfrogs

Wave at the neighbors, 

Be aware of your periphery.

Listen to yourself, dear, 

Auntie said, maybe she spoke of love,

And trust your gut

And say thank you 

For more fireflies this season

Always watch the sky

Smell the earth & air—

My iteration of how 

I have to try to live, 

My lessons, just blooming 

More somehow, amid

A million other

Beautiful ones 

I so want 

To hear. 

Pebbles

 I search for a peaceful place

No one will find it for me

No one will define it for me

No one will deter me 

I take in my place here

I take in my life, 

Its colors and textures

And stepping away, 

Into the great mystery

It is all of it

Just a peace

A piece

Air and shadow 

That stay as we depart. 

Heat, Eyes

 The Dipper

Orion’s Belt, 

My frail self says, oh

No one will believe me in

My clarity, but 

You have to believe me, 

The sky with its incomprehensible points

Infinite sketches of

Ancient knowledge, 

Their assessments & guides 

And the frogs, they’re quiet. 

It’s hot. 

Dew point to be wrestled

With and all the rest 

But no matter, 

I tell you there is constancy

Wonder

And the comforting homeostasis 

Of the momentary right 

I don’t think that I can know

Only feel. 

All is well? 

Maybe? 

Does a nanosecond count? 

Breathing Lessons

 We ride into the future on the wings of

Present harbingers

Skyways, shifts of light, the ambience 

Of a moment caught outside 

One found in days of just escaping 

I think we’d all best breathe in 

Miracles, whenever, wherever and

I can smell the rain and 

Loam breaths

Near-rise in miasma as I glance

Around, beyond

Beyond, and back to then and now.

Breathing in the outside

And listening to the thunder.

Amid Storm

 Got a message from the pre-heat-dome sky

Just now, as I alit for a moment

Pausing to feel

Not meaning to be trite 

But doing what all old farmers do, 

And turn my head, sniff the sky, search it too,

I was on the front porch, east to the lake.

The west wind came right up, blowing my greys

And as I came in to fix a bit of dinner, 

The light from the west called me back to the 

Door out into my gardens,

The soon-solstice sky that I saw and felt

Already coloring lush this vesper

Lovely, harbinger of solstice.