reading room

Old Technology

The word ‘Luddite’ lands with a thud, a thick
necked hick of a word, with a bad
rep and rap.  Let us call it
a ‘passive resistance’, a relaxing
into the soft nostalgia of witless
but wonderful technology;
a typewriter that won’t pick
out your mistakes in red, a camera
whose shutter makes a real
and necessary, pleasing ‘click’. 
Let us now and then again
see the world and its folk
unmediated by computer code,
and its best algorithmic postulation
of our unformed inclination.

Doors

The Ides of November brought hurricane winds and a three day power failure. I stood at the kitchen counter preparing dinner before it got dark and watched several of my grandmotherly pines bend and bend until they snapped, rebounded up and crashed to the ground. It was a good time to stay inside by the fire and put pen to paper. I had made pages of notes and two weeks of fruitless attempts to write a poem about Advent for the coming Word on the Hills holiday taping. A day of enforced leisure resulted in an acceptable draft, since polished and appended here. More interior work is shared on a link in Happenings

Advent

The coming starts with the going of the geese
in noiseless flight, solemn thoughts about
the broad, black-shouldered night,
and the long shadows even at noon.  With a sigh
we sink into the earth’s brown study, cocoon
in duffel wool, count the days until the advent of…

whom? what?

A smile, perhaps, 
at first soft snow, pure sugar-coating, while 
under our mittened hands the first snowman
rises to lead the charge with a broom.  
A time to sweep, perhaps,
and polish, shake out, decorate the room, bring in
the out of doors, the ever-living greens, the silver 
sparkle of the stars, red apple happy children’s cheeks.  

Who arrives? For whom do we open the day’s doors?  
Come we to them, or they to us?

Exciting packages and cards appear, scents
of baking rise to warm the house, at every turn
we hear choir-song and silver-tongued
bells, as each evening falls around us 
candles bow and curtsy, curtsy and bow.

And then…

on the last long night we arrive with grace
at clear, bright understanding of how
our own newborn halos are still ablaze,
our own gift is love until the end of days.

this shoulder
season pulls a Kinsale cloak an oiled canvas
coat over
the smooth curve
of sunned skin with a sigh
 
relentless
rain aslant icicle shard sharp drives us
to retreat
and attend to how
humble we are before water
 
 
 
Nov 2020
 

first frost

Inevitably -
the sky a bitter blue
the pasture white with frost
the horses crowd a triangle of sun

sept2020

Musing

two versions

I started with a black notebook – my phial of little bitter pills-
scribbled scrabbled drifts of words straining to be understood-
 
and then I found a muse among the silence of the golden hills,
among the trilling of the robinsong among the maple wood.
 
Aug 2016
 
 
At first I found myself a muse
And got myself a black note book
Which fast as the words flew became
A phial of little bitter pills
 
But then I found a muse myself
In the silence of the ancient hills
The never ancient trilling birds
The ever silent forest groves
 
May 2019

another river
whipsaws across the plain
undermining our beautiful bridges
why not wade in – why not
feel the pull we fear?