I’d just like to say again how, in both quantity and quality, this year’s Spring Poetry Runoff exceeded my hopes. I’m deeply grateful for everyone’s participation and consider hosting such an outpouring of spring passion a high honor. Seeing writers come together to play and ply their craft has been inspiring, and my hopes for [...]
It’s been a privilege and delight for Wilderness Interface Zone to host a spectacular flourish of spring poetry during this year’s Spring Poetry Runoff. In the kick-off post, I called for a show of green language, of creative élan and prospect-opening words. I asked for poetry that contained the recombinant stuff of fertile, world-making expression [...]
The Spring Poetry Runoff Awards winners will be announced next Monday, May 23. I hope everyone can hold out that long, but unexpected delays and the quality of the poems submitted have made selecting a winner for the Admin Award a very tough choice.
In the meantime, our normally scheduled postings will continue.
Thanks to a gorgeous stream of entries, WIZ’s 2011 Spring Poetry Runoff Celebration ran even deeper into the season than did last year’s. And indeed, this year’s Runoff has been an inspiring show of green and fertile language, above and beyond what I had hoped. In fact, I’ve been wowed, not just by the craftsmanship [...]
We’ve had a chilly April in southeast Utah, but this year, my neighbor’s barn swallows and the local colonies of cliff swallows returned to their traditional nesting sites two or three weeks earlier than they did during the past two springs. A few hundred feet down the road at a cattle pond that drains an [...]
We are celebrating that spring came over and we did not even make a move
Move, he says to me, we need to keep moving
We’re moving, the ground is moving behind our feet
You know what I’m gonna do when I am older?
Nuclear weapons
I’m gonna do nuclear weapons
I’m gonna do nuclear weapons with geraniums
See those geraniums how [...]
I could never make something so perfect, so precise
As midway between summer’s cauldron fire and winter’s ice
A revving of the engines, an adjustment of the eyes
From bleak to bright and coloured light. In short, it’s rather nice.
This season is a halfway house, an opening of blinds,
A rooster season, and a rood awakening of mind
To worlds [...]
At last the world leans the cobbled street
between Church and City Hall
in line with the sun.
The host of sparrows in the barren aralia vines
catches fire again, flickering and dancing so quick,
like a scaffolding of glad candles.
The forsythia hedge at the Mansion gate–
yesterday a row of tattered sticks,
today a bustling brass parade.
And we, the grey coated [...]
When the bobcat
flashed angrily through
the headlights
of Alan’s famous
Mustang,
we sliced the
silence to a primitive
stop and wild
eyed,
grabbed the
.22s resting cold and
anxious on
the back seat
Like
hunting hawks
dove
from the car
wings folded
The canyon echoed the crack
crack, crack as we fired
at shadows
We didn’t know then,
the cat
could
have cured us
and the quiet Spring night
soothed
our burning
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To read more of Steve’s poetry and see his bio, [...]
Warming rays over frost kissed flowers
Bids cold love depart into a smiling sun,
Enticed thereby to air and cloudy bowers
Where icy winds and snow have lately run.
An earth in step with brimming clouds above
Renews a onetime halted suitor’s dance,
Accepting rain’s entreating poet’s love,
Penned once again in arcing rainbow’s glance.
Cold voices from this blanket world rise up
To [...]