solstice fires

solstice fires

burn the old year’s dross

to ash . . .

the raven’s cry

like smoke on the wind

~red lights 13:2, June 2107

the galloping years

my mother’s voice

reciting The Highwayman

by moonlight

the gleam of a dark red love-knot,

the clatter of galloping years

~moonlight on water, 2016

poplar leaves

already freckled

with age

I pen an elegy

in elderberry ink

~Moonbathing 17, fall/winter 2017

finding I’ve shrunk

by an inch and a half . . .

yet the mountains

of my inner island

still converse with sky

~hedgerow 122, winter 2017-8

  

Roots

The old sugar maple at the southeast corner of the house had been declining for two years, and despite a wet summer its canopy was brown and bare long before autumn.  Yesterday, men with chain saws took it down limb by limb, leaving a gaping hole in the sky where the tree’s green depths once harbored hummingbirds. On winter nights I used to look out at its windswept branches, combed by fingers I never saw.

moon shadows

on the window pane 

. . . the silver

of my mother’s hair 

fresh-washed in death

~Haibun Today 11:4, December 2017

quicksilver

autumn harvest  . . .

moldering hay bales

sprout new grass

even as the whetted scythe 

mows down the years

no one

told me of his death,

the last

of my mother’s siblings . . .

ripples on the pond’s dark eye

the moon

so far beyond my reach

and yet I drink

from its reflection

this dipperful of light

other mothers’

diamond brooches . . .

I buff

the mossy jadestone

of her silver-legged frog

~Ribbons 12:1, Winter 2016

earthstrings

in a string

of starry lapis blue,

god

is the dappled dzi bead

earth-toned and warm

~Earth: Our Common Ground (2017)

the fingers

of a blind harper

touching

the earthstrings at dawn . . .

a wood thrush answers

~The Right Touch of Sun: 

TSA Members' Anthology 2017

But Now We Are Many

fire

on the mountain

fire in the mind

ashes ashes

we all fall down

The Smokies: ridge beyond ridge of ancient mountains, wrapped in a soft blue haze of rain and the moist outbreath of trees. The highest peaks are temperate rain forest, mossy and dripping. But now the picture changes . . . because the climate changes. Hot smoke replaces the gentle mist as fire consumes the forest, tinder-dry after months of heat and drought. Crown fires leap from treetop to treetop. High winds drive a firestorm through Gatlinburg, trapping people in their homes where they burn to death. Several days have passed and children are still missing. The Appalachian Trail smolders.

smoke

from distant wildfires

fills my lungs . . .

I dream of the blue planet,

one seed sprouting in ash

Pollen grains tell stories.  Drifting like gold dust on a cold wind, grass pollen sifts into lakes, to be buried in mud for 20,000 years. Grass pollen tells of an Ice-Age Europe covered with open steppes where forests should have grown—the climate favored trees, not grasses. But layers of ash tell stories, too—the story of fires that burned the forests, fires set by Paleolithic hunter-gatherers who transformed their world long before the first factory smokestacks began to spew their plumes of ash and deadly gases.

sparks

from a stone-age campfire

scorch the map

crumpled in my hand

a dusty oak leaf

~KYSO Flash 7, Spring 2017.  Finalist in ‘One Life, One Earth’ Contest.