Some come quickly now, a phrase to trigger more coiled upon the ground while others hibernate for days, for weeks and months, as if they might be dead without the touch of rain— that hard and brittle mindset to survive like deep-rooted filaree with all its colors, with all its seed waiting for a kiss. I know no other way to pen prosody.
Posted in Poems 2021, Ranch Journal
Tagged congruency, creative process, earth, evolution, filaree, inspiration, nature, wild, writing poetry
A fluttering of other lives
busy nesting out of reach—
dry thatches stashed on beams
under eaves like apartments
with squabbling, feathers floating,
on and on—as we lumber
beneath them, intertwined.
Crows claim the tops
of power poles on 65
through rolling hills of oats,
stacks of sticks close to roadkill—
adapting quickly to our urgencies,
to these forgotten outposts
of railroad towns
growing closer together.
Old violence is not too old to beget new values.
– Robinson Jeffers (“The Bloody Sire”)
With ease, we have evolved to softer versions
of ourselves—no longer lean, Dust Bowl men
in coveralls waiting for work and a weather change,
sinew no longer strained to stretch the harvest
of endless furrows. Within earshot of lamenting
old men leaning on fences, I was part of a future
doomed with easy-living, and so I have been
by comparison, yet with little time for visiting
face-to-face, eye-to-eye. We have become immune
to the violence next door, alive in cyberspace, and
deaf to war—the clash of sword-on-shield or bigger
better guns barking how to cull the herd—with ease,
we have evolved to envy dumb animals and birds
in touch with the sky, yearning for ignorance
and bliss. And all the old values now lost to youth.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2014
Tagged "The Bloody Sire", birds, Drought, evolution, Hereford Bull, photographs, poetry, Robinson Jeffers, values, Violence, war, wildlife
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