Category: Nature Poetry

Petals like sun-fires

beam along on a sloping hill.

A field of stars rolls

along the horizon.

Flowers are blessed with dawn.

Initially
while looking
you are bound to miss
Worlds.

The longer you stare,
the more open your eyes.

The wider your eyes,
the more things seem to come alive,

but not just outside,
also within.

This is as obvious
as the ebony beetle
scuttling along the blade of grass.

I brought all these books
to read, thinking

in them I will find
something?

—but already around me,
atop leaves sweetly
                     floating in a green breeze,

already about me,
shimmering along cicada wings,

already within me,
             swirling
             in a whirlpool

                       of fight,
                           light,
                           and sex

is the knowledge
of life.
It falls freely and abundantly.

I was lamenting again
my poverty, the conditions
that reduced my world into blocks and hoods,
and still today cuts boys and girls down
before their legs begin to take root.

I was lamenting
but then I saw the sparrows,
brown puffs of play
in the dirt, darting and twittering away.

Imagine, all of this suffering bursting
out of me like a diseased tree,
threatening to bury the sky and its night,
and the few stars the kids in the projects can see.
How selfish of me.

But the sparrows came,
and they played
with nothing but dirt;
they played,
and for that day, at least,
I and the world were saved.