Category: Riverwoods Poems

SPACE LITTER

(This morning on PBS I  heard that the Kepler telescope has recorded pictures of billions of earth-like planets)

The Kepler telescope reveals

To our horizon-seeking eyes

A multitude of habitable earths.

So we outcasts from Eden

May leave behind our trashed

And plundered planet

Without a backward glance,

Set out for new frontiers

As spaceship pioneers

Ready to sow invasive seeds

Across an expanding universe,

Unless we find pollution worse

Than ours preceded us:

A trail of uninhabitable husks.

November 2013

THANKS FOR BEING YOU

You were my Dear One,

You rang my chimes.

We had adventures.

We had good times.

No harvest moon

Outshines your smile.

We journeyed widely.

We danced the miles.

Rivers we paddled,

Mountains we climbed

Shine in my memories,

Pleasure my mind.

No better companion

Has brightened my way.

You lit my candle.

You made my day.

(RiverWoods, October 2013)

 

A SNAPSHOT IN TIME

From the bend of the river

We look back at town,

Our eyes first drawn

To the fall-colored copse

Of maples and oaks

Beyond the boathouse

Of the post-colonial

Academy and below

The cupolas of the

Briefly colonial capitol’s

Church and town hall.

Across the tumbling outflow

From the crumbling Great Dam

Rise mustard-colored walls

Of once-dockside warehouses

A mill run apart from

The towering smokestacks

Of one-time mills.   And

Then a fluttering flag

Marks the brick powder house

Whose contents were fired

At the Battle of Bunker Hill.

So much we see as we

Look back before we

Turn to go down the river.

WINTER MAGIC

Every year we fall for it again:

The first white flakes, ski tracks on

Virgin snow, the new moon shine

On ice-encrusted lakes, rime-

Frosted lawns and shivery dawns,

Wassail and holly and Good Saint Nick.

We never learn that it is all a trick,

A sleight of the Great Magician’s hand

To hide from sight the blasted rose,

The bony skeletons of leafless trees,

Their piles of wilted, sere and crumbling leaves,

Until the last soot-blackened snow patch goes.

OCTOBER SONNET

Here in my 87th fall, the tree

That I admire most of all is that

Tall maple which is verdant still

But flaming at the top.   its crowning

Glory gives a last exultant shout,

A last exuberant glowing out

Before its embers lose their fire:

That is the tree I most admire.  But

Since I cannot be a tree or emulate

Its majesty, my only role must be

To celebrate and drink a toast to constancy.

So here’s to beauty, here’s to reaching out

While standing still, here’s to blooming

In one’s place, here’s to saying yes to fate.

(October, 2013)

BLACK SWANS

(A black swan is said to be an event we did not foresee, contrary to predictions)

We used to think another Hiroshima

Would be our end.  But we were wrong.

We did not see the black swans coming

Round the bend: another Fukishima

Sowing seeds of deadly radiation,

Parched forests torched by lightning

Reducing us to ashes in the wind,

The choking sands of multiplying dustbowls,

The dying oceans rising to our doors.

Like lemmings we have teemed and overbred

And now are streaming headlong for the edge

Unless another black swan should arrive:

A mini ice age take us by surprise,,

Leaving a remnant to begin again.