Poetry

Tips of yellow skunk cabbage appear in the bog, sloughing off dead bracken ferns and decaying maple leaves. Within a few days, a handful of yellow periscopes unwind into bright-yellow half-shells that cradle spikes crosshatched with hundreds of tiny flowers filling the chill air with an astringent, skunky smell. Their scent attracts rove beetles into […]

Murmurations of wild birds Create poetry in the sky All become one And my joyful tears cry An ode to nature Babies and puppies and kittens too New life, new hopes, new dreams I’m inspired by the continuity of life And I scream An ode to nature Gardens grow providing food to eat From tiny […]

The truck bumps along hillside after hillside of charred, scarred and twisted trees in this ghastly fire-defeated forest. Prickly stickery burrs in the meager undergrowth are caught between sharp rocks and dry fractured mud. As a soft-shelled creature requiring the smooth sensuality of common sense to survive, this hardscrabble landscape is a horrible host offering […]

They came with the wind When they left, she stopped swaying Berries plucked and gone — J. Commander

Big-bellied rats have taken over  Dining in broad daylight  Quarreling over top spot, Well-guarded by an old crow  named Jim. I will not tend the feeders Not until spring When blue skies fill with  birds of all sizes and shapes  countless colors and calls  all reflecting the sun  and murmuring in unison “We’re back!” Diana […]

Hanging all alone, the last apple in the tree, thinks about the fall. — Sherman Schapiro

Apostolic, you flock, even frolic to your diabolic, vitriolic Moloch but end up melancholic No compensation, small consolation in predation, as elevation by subjugation changes not your destination Can’t go far because your lodestar’s the Death Star, your god a wannabe czar, leaving you as the dog who caught the car Garrett Snedaker

after the memorial – in which memories were returned again to life and salty tears and poems and muffled sobs from books and hearts made these pixels shimmer and made them stand and groove – we said good bye and didn’t walk from the church to the hall where strange quarter sandwiches and potato salad […]

Haphazard wind lurches through old-growth forest. Green canopy churns. Broadside trunks groan. Duff flies upriver like weightless condor feathers. Soggy soil slips grasp of tendril fingers underground. Twisted roots, black as grizzly claws, rend and rupture, disconnecting life force from its center. Totem topples, limbs crack rapid-fire, crescendo in a landslide roar that reverberates through […]

Young people at a music festival a nation’s grandchildren are never coming home as our bombs rain down     on another side of the world. Is it 45,000 deaths now? According to the UN most of the dead are women and children. Untold numbers are     wounded and orphaned. We weep for the mothers and all of […]

Reading them daily now As friends pass through Twisted, bumpy roads, Towards horizons And endless stars Carrying on Together, Where hearts beat Each moment Into something more Than just another day. Kirk Gothier