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 [...]
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 [...]
Palm hands
applaud the wind
that brings
lost cloud ships
slowing
to toss extra weight overboard
Rocky hills
blush green from
unexpected rain
Shy poppies
bloom
in spite of themselves.
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To read Judith’s bio and more of her poetry on WIZ go here, here, and here.
*contest entry*
On the warm late Spring shore, late
in a lunar glow,
he stood looking at the waves
trooping slowly, relentlessly into the cove
He stood wondering about the strings
of which some say he was made
Of what tidal forces were they drawn?
What sort of other moon forced him
into existence by its orbit around . . . what?
He placed his foot [...]
A robin arrived early spring with
snow on his breast and the
moon in his eyes heavier
than the moon in the sky.
He took his rest on my
gaunt apple tree and
the robin’s winter melody
began to haunt me, he
sang every day for twelve
days and on each day
an apple grew. I watched
him from the window.
The moon in my eyes
escaped with [...]
(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 [...]
Come slip between atmospheres of memory.
Knead yourself into cumulus—your airline ticket,
your pushbike, your liahona—with fingers like
the fingers of Doré’s sun. Sift marrow
until you feel soil part, feel the fern press its head
through mist then flatten against sudden emptiness.
Until you can roam sky without tripping on God’s
hem, can cloak in light
without singeing every shadow to ash, [...]