Beyond the budded lattice,
creamy cloud,
impermanent
as strawberries.
Is it my fault, dear reader, that such a cloud makes me think of
strawberry shortcake?
Category Archives: Nature
March 29.21: Coping
How like Venus,
with wisp of night cloud,
twiggy veil,
rising, unbowed,
daring the eye to see,
the word to say
what some Olympus
has made of clay.
Did you see it, dear reader?
What a wonder!
March 27.21: Coping
Hope is the thing with feathers,
according to the poet;
this wind-coiffed matted stalwart
is adamant to show it.
Waterlogged, bedraggled,
moroser by the hour,
he watches plashy pond,
indomitable and dour.
But persevering, patient,
resolute in attitude,
it isn’t raining rain, he says,
it’s raining fortitude.
I salute unpretty Hope,
my admiration bestirred:
it may be the thing with feathers,
but it’s surely a tough old bird.
With thanks to Emily Dickinson.
And to the purists I make no apologies for “moroser.”
It’s a poem. Ergo, poetic license.
March 19.21: Coping
When metaphor is obvious,
should writer take the bait?
Should she write what all can see,
then self-excoriate?
Such conundrum filled my head
as I marveled at the sky;
two swells of salmon brilliance,
sharp blue widened my eye.
But intruding on the beauty,
unwelcome imposition,
a bar of light reflected
like ghostly apparition.
It came from light behind me,
insubstantial, weightless thing,
reflection like a wall
blocking, interfering.
Herein the metaphor,
the cliché all writers dread:
how often what’s behind us
interferes with what’s ahead.
March 16.21: Coping
YESTERDAY
The gods of winter rose
against the fragile spring,
roared and raged in angst,
spat ice on everything.
The lilac buds all shivered,
the ducks could barely quack;
spring appeared forsaken,
winter had come back.
But winter gods, those bullies,
with eyes so cold and shifty,
know their days are numbered:
today it will be 50!
March 15.21: Coping
Early spring,
winter’s grip,
intense the will
at lilac tip;
just so within
the urge to sprout
though sunless times
and spirit’s drought.
March 5.21: Coping
Do they think they sing?
Can they be so deluded
to imagine their noise
sounds dulcet and fluted?
Do they look in the mirror
and see sweet warbling wrens?
What’s in their water —
hallucinogens?
Each blats like a semi
but thinks it’s a peep?
I ponder this nightly
in honk-battered sleep.
February 26.21: Coping
A bird in the hand
is better (it’s said)
than two in the bush,
but I’d say instead
that a bird in the bush
is the very best thing
when you long for a sign
there may one day be spring.
Yes, he is scarfed
and wearing his hat,
but his bright eye belies
any torpor in that.
He’s ready to nest,
and, oh, how he sings!
so sure is his heart
of seeds and of wings.
February 23.21: Coping
It seemed to me
miscalculation,
a frozen
discombobulation:
expecting spring
he here alighted
but found a landscape
winter-blighted.
With frosted beak
and bluebird fluff,
he groused (I heard him),
“Phoo! Enough!”
February 12.21: Coping
ODE TO DICHOTOMY
Sugar snow
makes winter sweet
if you like clompy boots
on both your feet,
if you like glassy streets
to slip and slide
while white-knuckled driving
petrified,
if you like your toes
and fingers too
stinging and reddened
to shades of blue,
if you like clothes like blubber
on arctic whale
just to go out
to get the mail,
if you like north winds,
those icy bullies,
roaring through layers
of itchy woollies,
if you like shovel kink
in your lower back
and a quiver in
sacroiliac,
but if you like a big sniff
of cookies oven-hot,
the company of stew
bubbling in a pot,
the softness of thick flannel,
most comfy of old friends,
the search for words and meanings
that never ever ends,
the pencil, pen, and mug
to draw and write and sip,
your sugar snow, like mine,
is introvert’s catnip.
