Skip to content

Year: 2012

Ghazal of Treaty Oak

April 13, 2012 • • 5 Comments

Great Treaty Oak, a poisoned husk,
bent boughs beneath this ashen dusk.

The deals we reached beneath this tree
portended its pale and broken dusk.

I always dreamed I’d shoot your scenes
beneath theses branches at golden dusk.

Long years and days withered away
and swallowed you in barren dusk.

Odd limbs still live and mingle with
new high rise lines in token dusk.

Somehow you found the way back home
all through the long moth-eaten dusk.

And the songs of city birds suggest
the dawn of some new-woven dusk.

—

This is for Joseph Harker’s Reverie 14: Ghazal Boot Camp using some of the words from Wordle 51 at The Sunday Whirl.

Note for non-Austinites: Treaty Oak is a 500-year-old southern live oak in downtown Austin. In 1989 some jackass poisoned it. After a major recovery effort, it survived and said jackass went to jail for a good long time. It’s still a big tree but only a fraction of its former self, yet ten years later it started releasing acorns again.

5 Poems

April 13, 2012 • • 2 Comments

I tried doing this thing of regularly linking to 10 poems, and it rarely got done so I’m downshifting to 5 in the hope that I’ll do this more frequently. Sure it’s fewer poems, but it’s only to serve you better. And, shamelessly, I start off this edition of 5 Poems with one of mine.

“if there are angels” is one of my small stones appearing over at Angie Werren’s feathers blog where Angie shares her beautiful micro-poems and this month she’s sharing her blog with others as part of Couplets: a multi-author poetry blog tour. Thanks, Angie.

“The Grackle” by Pat at Bailey Road: “With outstretched neck / He looks a bit odd / As he searches the skies / For the grackle god.” Wonderful grackle photos there too.

“Playing dodge ball in a super-collider” by Brian Miller: “Poe has a raven, Coleridge an albatross / and i / this parchment sky // where birds turn slow circles searching” Wonderful to find a vulture-inspired poem to follow the grackle one.

“Magpies” by Joseph Harker: “they arrow into the east (which is the future) / where the moon has come up like a wide / plate of marble. It is her face.” I’ve never seen a magpie since they don’t show up here in Texas, but there are a lot of really cool poems about them. This is one of them.

“Respite” by Deb Scott: “a pocket here, a soloist there / an unseen owl makes queries”. Birds and flowers from a spring walk. Great music in this one. Take the time to read it aloud. Deb’s also doing napowrimo so be sure to read some of the other poems she’s writing this crazy month.

Summer Triangle Rising

April 11, 2012 • • Leave a comment

I knew a woman who advised

write your poems in the sea
write your stories in the sand

the moon tries to pull
away the ocean but

only scatters tales
through the sky like fireworks

or knives dulled down
from overuse

I knew a man who claimed

constellations are knives
that slice up the darkest nights

this morning I saw Aquila,
Lyra and Cygnus

sneaking up on spring

What the Dog Saw One Night on the Beach

April 9, 2012 • • 6 Comments

The turtles came at night
and hid their eggs; the dog,
unwanted stray, came down to eat.

When angels hatched
he barked and stared, head
cocked and ears erect.

The first of the angels
lifted her goddess eyes
to this desolate wind-scoured
world of stony hearts
setting moon, roaring sea.

The dog considered the angel
a moment (which would count
as seven moments in human time)

then he trotted back to town
and lay outside the souvenir stand
where the owner usually left
a bowl of scraps each morning.

—

For Magpie Tales #112

—

Announcement: My book, Birds Nobody Loves, is on sale (15% off the paperback) throughout April in celebration of National Poetry Month. You can order it from Amazon or my e-store. I don’t know when (or if) the price will take effect at other retailers.