Why so still, they ask, why so heavy on the crisp needles your crush-grass, moss-wheezy, flopsy limbs? You sad? Your roots not fingering down into the soil and playing with stones and small tunnels, voles, beetle shells? Not sifting the crumbled leaves? You clomp. We is what was planted or what sprouted, willy-nilly, in aContinue reading “Speak Forest”
Category Archives: Poetry
Land
It opens, and then opens again,
grows over, and changes,
lose-some, gain-some.
There were trees,
once, deer cover, and browse,
hunting grounds of hawk and owl, squirrel runs,
old stumps and bark, nothing
if not hospitable ….
Ancestors
All my mothers are here
in their best dresses: mother
grandmothers, great-grandmothers;
of the men only my father
posed with cigarette in hand
and my grandfather on the sofa ….
Embroidered Field
Who pulled the floss from the skein
and knotted it, choosing
among the colors of flowers the colors of these
perfect, impossible asters, flower within flower,
corymbs and umbels, stitched in a time, I will,
I will not, I will, I will not. Knot ….
Field as Auditorium
You say my messages did not get through
What sound do messages make as they
lose themselves in the ether
glissando diminuendo
What is the sound of my lost language ….
The Puddle
In a rut in the dirt road:
a vernal pool. A few small,
almost transparent water striders
twitch the surface, and below them,
tadpoles wriggle and float
in the limpid water,
hundreds of them—all
straining cell by cell to be
among the living,
the fat, full-throated racket
and splurge of spring
up and down the creek.
Excerpts from MILLSTONES
The millstone set in a front yard
at the intersection of two roads
in Carrboro, North Carolina,
knows what we lost ….
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Maura High 