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!
Winter comes
in scarlet blushes
leaf by leaf
not in rushes.
Every day
each tardy dawn
takes more time
to stretch and yawn.
By slow degrees
the summer sizzle
wanes to frost
and chilly drizzle.
And so does Nature
try to warn
with color like
a honking horn.
More thanks to photographer S. W. Berg.
When words die
and lie
lightly in brown piles,
and slatted benches
hold no one
in their arms,
will the stones remember
warmth
of blood and bone,
do they
hearth-like
hold the meaning?
Or does meaning lie too
in the dry brown
awaiting its ride on the scattering wind
leaving the stones to their empty cold?
Thanks more to photographer S.W. Berg.
Into each cove
spring snow must fall
and the air must blur
with ghostly pall
the gardener must mutter
shovel and slosh
while egret and duck
in tiny galosh
point and laugh
with manners quite loose
at the hat with earflaps
on the head of a goose.
With buds of ice and baby leaves
the seasons wage their war
winter’s grip
in silvery drip
yields to seed and spore.
Happy freezing first day of spring, dear reader!
Tiny thicket, dense and dead
no match for green and pointy head
shoving up with life’s insistence
perennial’s epochal persistence.
Like wingbeat
a million splashes
each the size of one cricket note
but together rising, falling
in hypnotic patter
tell the time
of in-between
neither fall nor winter
but cradling interlude
to hold the year
one minute.
Dear reader, ever since I started using this new computer, I’ve noticed that the photos in my blogs come and go. Sometimes they’re there, and sometimes they’re not. Please bear with me. I have no idea why the photos sometimes don’t appear. This one is supposed to have a photo in it, but it doesn’t at the moment. Perhaps sometime before the end of time I will figure out what’s going on. Or isn’t going on, as the case may be.
I am so old
that I can remember
a time we decorated
only in December.
What were we thinking?
Why didn’t we see
the whole twelve months
celebratorially?
Thanks again to the S.W. Berg Photo Archives
and to the D.J. Berg sense of celebration.
In patient vigil
saplings and their elders
abide
bed-side
soon leaves for summer shade
for winter blanket
again
again
Now becomes Then.
More thanks to the S.W. Berg Photo Archives
and the curator thereof.
Sometimes the genies of summer
won’t let go their hold
so we arrange their favorite bottles
and put out our own red and gold
thus do we help Mother Nature
get on with the business at hand
cooling our heat-weary world
coloring it with new crayons.
Thanks to the S.W. Berg Photo Archives and the D.J. Berg Whimsy Archives.
