Ready to Make Friends with Poetry? ⟶
Four thirty a.m. The “chree-chree-chree” sounds in the far off greeny bog. “Whis-tle” “whis-tle” “whis-tle” returns the call, floating notes through the open window. A chorus of chirps and cheeps overlap like leaves in a pile at the singing tree, all the feathered throats announcing– messaging, instantly– a new day never-been-done day, it’s-another-start-day. So I…
Facing the stove, I busy my hands with this thrice-cooked fowl, weaving waterherbs and onions to conjure a warming repast for our souls.Skin holds meat, meat holdsbone (or is it the other way around?) andas chunks slip and slide into the bubblingpot before me, I wonder, wordless,at the speed with which we revereand revile our…
Botanically speaking, the plant names trip on the tongue with some effort (mine) but once murmured, sound like the tune to an old song I’ve known all my life, the words rolling off in chunks of meaning as I pass by a rainbow of familiar flora – oleander–-pinnate, poisonous, softened by pink and purple eucalyptus–fragrance in crushed wood, leaving the warmth…
Hanan Samuel Collins, Age 8 Multnomah Falls, OR I wrote this poem on the January day in 2003 when my first grandson, Hanan Samuel, was born. Your birth today unequivocally proved that science still can do nothing at explaining the miraculous. The day you came into the world the…
(after Gerard Manley Hopkins) Narrows Bridge, WA, photo by the author Glory be to God for freeway things For vehicles chrome-colored as Airstream and kin For billboards and tires that erstwhile sing Lemony busses, soldiering vans with commuters in. Praise Him all wheels and pavement, …
Building a marriage is timber over time, the on purpose-ness of candles on the table on a run-of-the-mill Saturday night illuminating the daily gift that says, “I made something for you.” It’s a pile of firewood carried through the cold, banked against the night’s chill. Opera music, loud on the stereo while dinner cools and…