Most Wondrous Poem

 The Song of Wandering Aengus 

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire a-flame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And someone called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done,

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

William Butler Yeats

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. 

Unbroken

 I arrive in the twilight

Watching night coming on

Things shape now into a

Newly-unknown reality. 

Not a light on the patio

Save the lowered gleam of

My phone

Gunnar on the edges, 

Going out onto patrol 

As twilight gives way

Fireflies 

Meanwhile, 

Spare, barely noticed—

The hummingbirds have gone to bed

Bullfrogs quiet and sonorous—

A drop of rain

A drop of rain

A drop of rain

Gentle

On this bounty 

I won’t ever tip us out

Of our little sailing moonshadow

Seems the rocky seas do

Rock us 

Gently now.

Calm

 Sometimes I’m just 

Calling 

For the kind and sweet 

Of you.

Title No Title

 After the eclipse, 

When my hair turned white

(and I’ll be writing about that later),

Now comes here Israel Iran

Biden Harris Austin, and

The tight circle of 

Situation

This, and have at what/who/where 

This is,

has been coming for decades,

Forever and ever amen,

Ancient

Mideast war that somehow 

Has to happen now

Or the new world war will have 

Finally come soon

Collision

Eclipse

Mids

Easts 

Clouds, canopy and air,

Earth moves,

Quake and water,

These are the lights, they point to 

real days beyond the flood

Drones

Missiles’ bombs

Fossils

To fossil fools

Revolution of

The Anthropocene

Arrives,

Rogue actors ascend

Though in our alert of senses

We know not who they are, 

Nor yet how we respond. 

Wrestling

 Last night I dreamed

I lost my cellphone and my passport

And then, oh

I found after some

Ultimately futile 

Contemplating

About what to do

That alas,

I’d also lost my driver’s license

And the billfold in which I carried it

And 800 dollars, and 

But, and  

Where, I woke to ask

Was I going?

In my dream, 

After I knew I’d lost my passport

And my cell, 

I was frantic:

Dad! Oh how can I even find you?

So I started

(In my dream) 

To look through the cupboards

In my grandmother’s pantry

And just when I despaired,

I found I’d tucked my 

Carryall,

My pocketbook—

The grey bag with lots of pockets—

Tucked it 

Into the cupboard where

The china was, 

That she wanted me to have

I found it

And so I woke to ask

Who am I? 

Way it Is

Winter

Pondering if it is a truth, that I’m kind of isolated and getting to be an old woman up here, trying to make a difference, juggling integrity, weariness, love and all that bit. I sit looking out of my nighttime windows, and it’s the strangest outside I’ve seen in some time. The north is still snow-covered, though mud is everywhere the rest.

I realize I’m becoming used to green winter, though it does feel random still, and in my recall I think on snow pinwheels in May, early snow before Halloween one year, powdering an icy sprinkle. Seems a little frivolous, a frivolity I may need to think on a bit more. 

It is 1-9-24

I wrote a poem a long time ago about green winter. I’ve been thinking about it for many moons. And ten years ago I sat to look into this kind of winter sky, wrapped as now into what just is, and later, in the shift in my interior wandering, I started to muse on my last quarter, and wrote about that too. 

The arctic, though, in that poem I wrote maybe ten years ago, shivers now, still, and dissipates into another kind of moment, deepening into a whole again. There is breath and life in an arctic, and I breathe anew that breath. Part of me has to wonder if it’s about this last, a past, in the beautiful warp of time. Perhaps we take our leavings on a wild, wondrous cold slide navigating worlds, cosmos, and so forth, and so I ponder.

I didn’t take my hearing aids out tonight. I usually do. Oh wind-whipping beauty, oh the life pattering on my metal roof: rain? Sleet? Hail? Small messages from restive clouds, portending snow? I don’t know, and I could be afraid, and maybe I should. But I’m not, really. As I write, I think hmm. Derecho. 

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