Poems I read at the Marine Poetry Crawl
April 21, 2018, Marine on St. Croix, Minn. Organized by Tammy Newcomb and the Marine Community Library Association. Featuring nine poets reading at Ostlund’s Marine Garage and the Village Hall.
Haiku seasons
A haiku is a
sandwich made of syllables –
a picnic poem
Flocks of black damselflies
swarming clumps of purple irises
Paddling alone
the river keeps me company
Trumpeters return
Pushed downstream by freeze-up
Snow follows their wings
Walking untracked trails
The sun melts fresh-fallen snow
Halfway north again
leafless trees conceal
sap running up the maples
frost still in the soil
Dew settles at dusk
A field full of fireflies
Dark barely holds on
A single firefly blinks
across the dark backyard,
summer sun’s soft search.
Goldenrod standing stiff
warm air rushing up the hill
ruffling my ideas.
Nothing moves but the wind
Sit a while and the birds forget you are here
Then I forget I am here
On the point between the ponds
Wood ducks wheeling overhead
The end of the only season that matters
Rock paper scissors
Rock
Resists the current
The oldest history,
The geology,
The foundation
The soil and the slopes
Habitat and home
Beats scissors
Loses to
Paper
Beats rock
Records my words
Life growing from
The ground up
Rearranging molecules
Transferring energy
Eating and being eaten
Loses to
Scissors
Cut the leash
The havoc of thunderstorms
Freezes and thaws
Seasonal swings
Sun and rain
Drought and flood
Beats paper
Rock paper scissors
Balanced odds
Each force equal
Maybe that’s the way
The world is
But I think it’s
complicated
Bluff walk
My legs need to burn
Stomach needs to chew
Lungs need to suck
Heart needs to pound
Blood needs to move
through my veins
Ears need pinesong
and silence
Eyes need eternity
Skin needs to sweat
Worry needs wonder
Belwin bison haiku (2015)
flocks flutter around
great brown ghosts in the tallgrass
silence sprawls above
Thirty-five tons of flesh
Melts into the rainy prairie
Evading our eyes
Looking almost black
As they loaf and eat green grass
Closer than ever
one of many callers
to distant brown lumps on a
bright Monday morning
asleep at midmorning
I turn away, write, look back
they’re awake, grazing
a mom and two kids
borrow my binoculars
“Cool! Look at their tails!”
sunny and windy
both of us hungry, tired
by long summer days
the beasts far off on soft green slopes
she holds my leg when gusts hit
Navigate haiku
gulls riding gray gusts
swoop over the river
painting the wind white
step out of your head
through the St. Croix scenery
into the canvas
Cambrian sea sand
cold lava, glacial debris
sculpted by water
a new point-of-view
the land where we stand matters
more than what we see
people change places
where we go is who we are
trees bending to sun
