Category: Riverwoods Poems

Poems from 2001

  • RIVERWOODS POEMS: SPACE LITTER

    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

  • RIVERWOODS POEMS:THANKS

    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)

     

  • RIVERWOODS POEMS:A SNAPSHOT

    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.

  • RIVERWOODS POEMS:WINTER

    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.

  • RIVERWOODS POEMS:OCTOBER SONNET

    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)

  • RIVERWOODS POEMS:BLACK SWANS

    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.

  • RIVERWOODS POEMS: A PAUSE BY A POND

    A PAUSE BY A POND

    We stop to sit awhile beside

    Our pond, the asters to admire

    (The royal purple, not the white)

    And note the scarlet-turning sumac,

    Hoping we may hear the flap

    Of slow-descending heron wings

    Or hasty mallard putting on the brakes

    And ruffling up the water, though

    We know our watering hole’s too small,

    And yearly getting smaller, to attract

    A southbound flyer not at all

    Deluded by our wooden replicas.

    At least we may sight the shifting V’s

    And hear the goodbye calls of geese.

    The fall migration’s underway

    And only we must opt to stay.

  • RIVERWOODS POEMS: BUYER BEWARE

    BUYER BEWARE

    I marvel how the trunks of dead and dying trees

    Are garlanded in fall with poison ivy leaves

    Gladdening the eye and asking to be gathered

    To deck a table for a feast in autumn.

    As coral snakes beguile like harmless cousins,

    Just so were ancient reefs adorned with sirens,

    Caskets with resurrection lilies beautified,

    And cereals with powdered sugar iced,

    And no-down-payment mortgages entice.

    Glittering like gold is worthless pyrite.

    Caveat emptor still is good advice.

  • RIVERWOODS POEMS: SQUAMSCOTT BIRCH

    THE SQUAMSCOTT BIRCH

    Barrel chested and brawny armed,

    The aged birch still stands

    Incongruous on the riverbank.

    They have fenced it in

    With posts and a metal chain

    To ward off scrambling kids.

    How many years did it take

    To put out all those limbs,

    One torn off by lightning

    Or by wind: the scar remains.

    It’s younger than the pines

    That sheltered shell diggers,

    But did it watch the big-sailed

    Gundalows barging bricks?

    It could not in its salad days

    Arrow skyward slimly straight

    But branched and branched again

    For what was near at hand.

    Hugely ugly, it calls

    Out to me.  It haunts my

    Memory.  It’s begging to be

    Made into a poem.

  • RIVERWOODS POEMS: A Poem for Carl Sagan

    A POEM FOR CARL SAGAN

    (and NASA’s Natalie Bataha, who discovered Kepler 10)

    “In order to let go, you have to be there

    In the first place,” Carl said.

    Walking and seeing, perceiving and feeling,

    Attention must be paid:

    Inspecting grains of sand, glimpsing exo-planets,

    Forgetting the self,

    Neurons interconnecting, concocting recipes,

    Not “buying off the shelf.”

    Though we are merely stardust

    And to stardust must return,

    Our flickers of light, in the midst of dark matter,

    May provide some insight.