Tag Archives: poetry

Night shrinks into shadows rising
to ridges trimmed in gold, the day
awakes with or without us.

An eagle retreats
a crow escaping
four and twenty blackbirds:

squadrons of fighter pilots
patrolling nests—like flycatchers
on the peck riding the shoulders

of hawks—a brutal business
in the air over eggs
and babies in pintails

needing to be fed
or be food for others—
trees full of gaping beaks,

all the helpless beginnings
awaiting their place by design
amid hostilities of spring

No evening news to discuss,
nothing to eclipse the day’s
smooth accomplishments:

the horse and cattle dance
across the road, the sort
and ricochet to load

fractious bull calves
for town—the seed is ripe
we are harvesting.

Market always up or down,
I remember my epiphany
at forty, dickering over price—

not trying to get rich,
but bank enough to stay
another round of seasons

looking for sign,
listening to voices
recorded on ridge tops,

all looking down canyon
through time      upon
this clod of ground.

© 2016 Neal Lett

 
The Sirens sing in each man’s odyssey,
in every woman’s role as Penelope,
faithful to themselves by all accounts:

old myths woven and those unwoven
memories spun yarn remembers
in the yet unfinished shrouds

in which we cloak ourselves, cast
into the present tense a tick-at-a-time.
No grace reliving past temptations

or heroics, those flashes dimming
with mundane routines of earthly
jobs, of quiet talk with our gods.

The noisy diversions
like crow and coyote
drawing mothers off
from helpless babies.

It takes a clan
to raise blackbirds, nests
stacked in the redwood,
a squadron to attack,
ride and peck the head
of a cruising crow
moaning in retreat
as its mate shops for squab
to feed their own.

Between the yard trees,
the cackling battle churns
with aerial acrobatics,
evening strategies,
each new act
our entertainment.