Our day never done
discussing cattle
instead of politics:
all the pig-headed
pontificators hawking lies
like sideshow barkers.
A nation sick to death
trying to get back to normal
we’ll never see again.
We ride this wild earth,
hang-on with gentle hand
feeling for a familiar rhythm.
Brand new day
in some places waiting
for the last egg to crack
from the inside out.
Metaphor for everything
that matters, exploding
to the four winds,
blindly finding legs
hard to corral
with shrill words
they’ve never heard
‘til now.
We waited ages,
marked it with a rock
in the gravel drive.
Only the lesser man regards himself
as superior, assured and measured
by the whims of fleeting fortune—
he clings to hackneyed slogans
like jetsam in the raging river’s storm.
Beef dressed in a layer of white fat,
you cannot tell the color of its hide
on the rail, when cut and wrapped
in butcher paper, or ground to satisfy
your convenient consumption.
In this global herd of humanity,
fear is the currency of exchange
rekindled with falsehoods
propagated by impromptu scripts
to be played by bad actors.
This is not the only show on earth!
Do not be afraid to respect a man’s
hands and heart, learn to look him
in the eye and listen to a rhythm
common beneath your skin.
© Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
Son, they all must be crazy out there.
– Michael Burton (“Night Rider’s Lament”)
We get the news as black or white,
reckless words that conceal the truth
reduced to red and blue enamel.
No sage advice from Washington,
no common sense to right the Ship
of State, and no one at the tiller
to face the tempest’s hate—too busy
painting enemies to blame
while adding anger to the storm.
We get your craziness in colors
with the rising smoke and flames
on a planet waging war
in the cloud of a pandemic
neither understood nor cured—
a collage of clashing colors
without a brushstroke for compassion,
discipline or pride lucrative enough
for the media to cover
with an appetite for anarchy
where only self-righteous ride.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2020
Tagged anarchy, Covid-19, media, pandemic, photography, poetry, politics
Pink Echinopsis twice in May
after a peak of 110 degrees
like an afterthought—like a sign.
Thin dark clouds float upcanyon
like submarines at dawn,
gun-metal gray—oaks black
on blond hillsides like burnt spots
in the draws. Dark green sycamores
bring the creek flow to a stop.
Morning chill upon the breeze
brushes my bare chest, invigorates
the flesh one more time.
Blessed are we with the diversions
of spring in bloom: colored orchestrations
of multisyllabic assonance rhyming
with short-clipped awe: an ever-changing tune
that steals the senses midst tumultuous times.
Blessed are we to be alive with work to do.
Always the War to measure the world by:
patriotic hawks enlisting reluctant doves
as fodder that shocked us into an explosion
of lyrics and melodies—an awakening
for music, a renaissance for humanity
we pray may come this way again soon.
The telephone line goes cold;
birds tread it wherever it goes.
– William Stafford (“The Farm on the Great Plains”)
He was old, but younger than I am today,
digging earthworms for a rusty coffee can,
cane pole and cork bobber for the bass hole
on the Kaweah where he pumped water
for summer pasture before the Flood of ‘55
took it all, but memories, downstream.
In those days, we were rich with time to spend
on foolishness, watching water and bobber
in the warm morning’s sunshine. I call
back occasionally, but there is no ring
on the other end for anyone to answer,
no one left at home, no fish in the bass hole.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2020
Tagged birds, Kaweah River, photography, poetry, redwing blackbird, William Stafford
Miracles begin
with rain enough to restore
dry hills green again.
Posted in Haiku 2020, Photographs, Poems 2020
Tagged haiku, photography, poetry, rain
All alone beside the streams
And up the mountain-sides of dreams.
– Robert Louis Stevenson (“The Land of Nod”)
Gray days, low clouds hide
green horizons, the divide
between us and the bizarre
business of Coronavirus
nightly counting corpses
like sheep to fall asleep
in the Land of Nod.
Sequestered among the heavy
heads of Fidddleneck
bowing wet with rain,
our dreams unchanged:
sweet grass enough to keep
cattle fat and happy,
to keep us hungry with
high hopes for humanity.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2020
Tagged Fiddleneck, photography, poetry, Robert Louis Stevenson
Watching the corrals from a distance:
young men a horseback dancing in the sort
of cows from calves before branding
amid a discordant chorus, the same
plaintive song of years worn thin
that holds the heart in place as the eyes
fade and the mind wanders a far
ridge searching for the first split
in the trail that leads to this short
moment of chance and circumstance—
apart and beyond the world’s fear and all
the raw conflicts that feed it senseless.
A man rides by the seat of his pants,
pockets of memory that reach for the rhythm
of a horse collected, the singing twine.
drycrikjournal 