I watch the hawk as it sits, watching me It turns away first, knowing I can't reach it nor see it as it sees me
Hawk Kyōka
3
Category Archives: Poetry
POEM: Fairy Tale Wisdom
We watch the naked emperor like nothing is amiss, and recoil upon sight of frogs wise of what lies in a kiss. We trust the familiar too much, and the odd too little. We love a beauty even when she's selfish or she's brittle. There is a Jack for each giant, and many clever cats, and, sometimes, we cheat the man who takes out all our rats. The other foot will always fall, even when blinded by hope. Sometimes it pays to play dimwit, but not be an outright dope. Each tale tells us of ways to be a better, kinder soul in a world filled with all manner of monster, fiend, and troll.
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POEM: Below the Stone Dome
The stone dome bubbled from the jungle stands stern like a knob of nothing. The green growth that girds that whole hump is living, like some hallowed habitat -- filled full of all forms of flora, with big bugs, and all the creepy creatures.
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POEM: Knee-Jerk Speciesism
https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/121 [via Wikipedia]
I glimpsed the red hourglass, vibrating in a stone wall -- a Black Widow spider, bouncing on a thin web spun within the void of an absent rock -- that gap forming the spider's recessed hide. And instead of being happy that the spider had found a fine shelter, I worried that a child would stick a careless mitt deep into that wall hole, and be bitten on the hand. In retrospect, this seems so unfair to the spider.
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Tall Grass Haiku
wind-ruffled tall grass bobs and rebounds aimlessly and yet in concert
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POEM: A Salty Tale of Blue Skies
The culling ships came, and brought us deep, blue skies. Those who never saw them could not have suspected that the fast, mad machines were about to crash hard, as if on rocky shores, and no one would be left to tell our salty tale - except those azure skies.
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POEM: The Power of That Which Bumps in the Night
The last lamp out dips the room into darkness [sudden darkness] and in the nothingness, before vague shapes form, a clunking sound triggers the stab of an adrenaline spike into ones chest -- mainlined frisson, or fright: the heart thumps, the chest cinches, the stomach lurches, breath is sipped spastically, and an involuntary noise escapes from some unnamed place within. The power of strange and startling thuds and whumps has fueled many a storybook, but though the mystery is rarely solved, we get over it soon enough.
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POEM: Lighthouse Keeper
The lonely lighthouse keeper, peering through a deep-set but narrow window at waves smashing onto the rocky shore, spouting upwards in a fanned geyser. So much depends upon his maintenance of momentum, but the better things go, the more dreadfully boring is life, and when things go poorly, there are russian roulette odds of tragedy. Like life on a mountain, but when someone crashes into the mountainside, the mountain-man is an unlikely participant in the tragedy.
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POEM: Ripples & Stillness
ripples expand from some unseen center where a fish feeds, and when stillness returns i welcome its short life
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POEM: Starlight
I shambled out to watch the fine-fired light of some bright but distant star. The message in that moment was old news -- more than ancient & less than relevant, yet it was the only news on offer. If one traced that line of light back towards its source, one might find the source no longer existed, its last instant recorded in the caboose passage of light as it whizzed past.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 