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