Category: Nature Poetry

Early morning—building creaking, alarm
in hallway, broken, going off.
Winter whispers through a slice of unclosing
window and goosebumps respond to its call.
Cars honk, angry men honk louder,
voices rumble and blend together,
an ambiance that says “alive.”
Morning has arrived,
though some are no longer here to greet it,
some have faded with the prior night—
it’s all bullet shells and rockets blazing,
fangs tearing and beaks breaking;
it’s all an ecstasy of perfumed sighs,
a veiny gripping explosion of cries.
Moons go down and ignite horizons
all over the great body,
while buses nearby trace it
like geese in the distance.
The body stretches, creaks, and yawns.

This very breath

             is the life that births leaves.

            These very leaves in evening breeze

is life that fills me.

Sometimes, I close my eyes and imagine

the breeze
taking it

all

from me,
leaving purity

like sunlight on the surface of a river.

I woke up to the light of the sun,
and it revealed all mysteries.

In a flash, I knew the meaning of a flower,
it was there in its scent
and in the pressure of its fine hairs on my skin.

The sea of my thoughts had parted
and in its place flooded the sea of sense;
my ears rumbled
when I rested on a nautilus,
and my tongue rolled along with grains
of salt speckled waves.
…  

I’m shouting into the air—
                   shouting
                         I have found it—
the meaning of shouting!

It is the air, bare
to the lungs as they squeeze
to grasp every drop of light and water.

It is that wanting, that losing,
and the prayer that then rises

from the valley to stoke
every branch on the bluffs
with flame,
and casts every shadow away
from every corner of stone
in the wake
of its journey to the peak of the sky.

Now I smile to it
before my return to night
and the dream of undivided things.