Distant ocean fogs
bank backyard horizons—
petals ripple.
**
Midnight showers
remind me
of my poncho,
packed away.
**
Waking,
feeling like choppy water
that slowly goes its way
as I go mine.
**
Flowers—this morning
without breeze,
I stop too
with the flowers this morning,
absent movement,
letting flutter
torrents of thought—yellows,
greens, still white petals,
naked, at home.
**
Been waiting
for a calling,
you could say,
when it was time,
and when it was,
movement followed
as light as light
that lay on meadows,
and music-words
filling air
sparkling with songs
of praise.
**
Someone once said
when reason doesn’t reach
far enough,
listen for the songs—
carried by breath, they out-last
the feet, know the way across,
surge us to where we are to be,
right to the very end.
**
haiku extending
opens into tanka—form,
so called: all of breath
**
—the sketch…
learning to hear
light and shade, the hand
speaks across the page
**
even the smallest
petals don’t quiver—quiet,
the sky holds its breath
**
—May, here, 2023
at a distant gate,
death waits a young friend—nearer by,
graduation songs.
**
—from Santoka:
“Return to that fundamental foolishness
and protect it…
Thoughtfully planting
the seed of a tree
that will some day die.”
**
The whole morning reading poems
aloud: AR Ammons, Santoka, my own,
like chanted sutras—calmed breath
waiting the bell to still…
full, complete
**
Approaching eighty,
all I really know is death
is married to life
which makes us all loved offspring
and siblings, like it or not…
**
“Lord, let me become Thy wind-blown leaf.”
—Nancy Tilden
I once had a teacher—
she opened in me
what’s to be free.
I once had a teacher, her eyes
showed me she’d seen
—her poems, the longing,
voice held the prayer, lips
the praise—
I once had a teacher who showed me
