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: Photography
April 7.21: Coping
Until the next pandemic
we’ll pack our masks away;
I’ve no idea when,
but it will be some day.
They’ll go into the drawer
inscribed The Fibber McGee,
where souvenirs and remnants
await next century.
When comes that barefaced day
we hug with glad impunity,
when everyone is safe
with ’round-the globe immunity,
I think that I might feel
a twinge of slight regret
and miss that unloved sign
of one-for-all mindset.
I’ll miss the muffled greeting of
“Hey, I like your mask!”
acclaimed by passerby
I didn’t even ask.
And then I must return
to pre-pandemic place
where no one ever hails me
with “Hey, I like your face!”
April 1.21: Coping
It’s Poetry Month!
Awake, Chanticleer!
It’s a Word Party
for one-twelfth of the year!
Such rarified air —
how best celebrate?
Use words like behoof,
whence, vulpinate?
Will I write my to-do list
in tripping dactylic,
wear diaphanous robes
though I look imbecilic?
What shall I read?
Some Dickinson, Frost?
Maybe an epic
like Paradise Lost?
Yes, I’m name-dropping;
it’s only a ruse
for what I tuck in them:
my friend, Mother Goose.
Does rhyme make a poem?
I think not, but then
I don’t know what does —
it’s out of my ken.
I’ve read and I’ve wondered
if anyone knows
why some works are called poems
and not just fine prose.
What makes a poem?
Can I know beyond doubt?
Will Poetry Month
help me figure it out?
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 8.21: Coping
What we see every day
after a bit of life
we no longer see.
Then a puckish light
intrudes
and conjures a shadow
there and not there,
playing,
and we watch
with sudden sight.
More thanks to photographer S.W. Berg.
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.
