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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Beneath the ramble and catch
of tumbleweed: the lull of horizon
delicious with distance and elegy,
dead-ends and blue highways hoarse
with the whisper of wind, dust,
wood, bone, memory—the grist
of solitude stirred up
the morning you woke determined
to pluck the sun from God’s thigh
as he passed, full-stride,
over this side of town. That’s
how Jacob got new-named, you say
when the story comes [...]
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Spring elegance.
(after reading “Deer in the City” by Patricia Karamesines)
Deer rise up from the page
Like the walls of stone houses from the Mesa
As we top a rise on our drive across the Mesa
A few years after fire drove across
Uncovering new pots, new sites
The stone houses uncovered old memory
Older than the 40-odd years I have longed for [...]
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Spring casts lots of thin shadows; summer lays down clouds of shade.