Categories
Poems

Christmas Love

Revelers swing round lamp posts;
snow flakes swirl through the air;
street lamps cast golden circles;
church bells sound in the square.
We spent the last penny in our pockets
on a drink we shared in the bar;
now night has cloaked us in darkness;
the city lights are glimmering stars.
Warehouses are shut and forbidding;
a train stops with a screech and a hiss.
We stand by the cold quick river;
I brush snow from your cheek and we kiss.
This old American town tonight
was never once so bright by day;
the cruel agonies that color our lives
have faded to a harmless grey.

In the churchyard the graves are cracked and crooked;
it’s where friends and family lay remembered;
all their smiles and laughs still treasured
on this snowy twenty-fourth December.
We’d keep the parlor lit by soft light;
while music played, shadows danced on the wall.
I knew the good times could never last forever;
I just never knew how quickly they could fall.
But night brings charming dreams anew,
and when dawn comes they’re with me still;
I’ll share them with you this Christmas Day;
we’ll let hope shepherd us, come whatever will.

Categories
Poems

Maps

Cartographers formerly inked squares
with dragons near their peripheries
and precipices over which ships tumbled
to Hell, or rocks, or seas
never known before.

And quack chiropractors with pricking needles
tattoo courses: their phony kinesiology
tracking down one’s back like generations
sprouting from a family tree.

These are maps, each a colorful arras
of pictograms and symbols,
an archive of devils and seraphs,
of the cosmos and the void.
Maps, one and all.

And their significance?
What shall be their importance,
ages and eons hence?
When the streams have dried,
and the crabs have hidden
in the sand of the ocean floor?

Only that maps etch themselves
and have recorded our paths and their ends
which lie in the distance like misty Incan ruins,
faint epitaphs of their architects.

Categories
Poems

Nautilus

Nautilus
A good poem, like a good riddle,
May take a long time to unwind,
And in that time we find its pleasure.
The old nautilus shell—spiraling,
Whorled, and iridescent—shows at once
Its bright chambers to light
And hides its cavities in shadow.
Turn the thing, and find its great eye
Watching like a riddle, or a poem,
To see whether its strange bearing can be found.
They are ancient and pearly, these things,
Found on the floors of deep waters:
Hard without, soft within, cryptic and fascinating—
A verse in a nautilus, a nautilus in verse:
The labyrinth at home in its library.

Categories
Poems

A Nighttime Stroll

While I marvel at the starred, phantom sky—
where silver clouds scud and the pale moon beams
in an epic ether, tinted ink blue—
a weary, worthy town slumbers and dreams
of fortune, of flight, or falling through space.
Where the air smells of pine sap and wood smoke,
fireflies blink, the dirt path leads into trees,
and pondside bullfrogs call mates with hoarse croaks.
When descending the hill through low grasses—
that run to the foot of a hemlock stand,
whose spectral shadows hide the wispy way—
there come a turn and vista of the land.
There lie the distant village and spired church,
the quiet houses, and earthy, quaint lanes
surrounded by arable wheat pastures:
rolling hills topped with rippling grains.
While on a solitary nighttime stroll
through rustling grass and the brisk, biting breeze,
in view of an old, wild, gleaming river,
there comes a worn, welcome feeling of ease.

Categories
Poems

New Spring

The memories of raw winter fade like youth
before the season’s budding daffodils.
We used to walk this narrow path together
from our home to the crest of the bare hill.
There we stopped to watch whitecaps and sea oats.
Just as often, we stayed home, nude in bed.
While the coffee steamed over a blue flame,
I kissed your ribs, and you let yourself be led.
The dogs lazed, and dust dappled the light beams.
Such are the warp and weft of the past’s loom,
whose fabrics are of unstylish design.
I moved houses when the hyacinths bloomed.
I left behind our old, bayonetted ghosts.
Such battle-weary and war-torn phantoms
are taxing partners for the jaunty soul
and will hold a wistful mind at ransom.
I left pining wraiths in our kitchen and field,
where, with great care, we’d raised violets and phlox.
So, when spring came, and the air’s clean perfume
was beholden to fields of wild lilacs,
my mind involuntarily recalled you.
But I’m holding hands with a new lover,
so I take the unsought reminiscence,
lay it back among ivy and clover,
and walk with her from those bygone places,
into the sunlight that warms our faces.

Categories
Poems

Downtown at Dusk

In April when the crepe myrtles and cherry trees bloom,
city folk are reflected in the rain’s puddles,
by water that serves as mirrors for impressions. 
Wind whips billowy clouds into an eastern gloom,
while on the shiny street, a wayfarer huddles
beneath the tall windows of lordly professions.
The sun leaves plum-shaded shadows beyond buildings
and beams wash walls in apricot and tangerine.
In this fine twilight, a black cat’s lime-gold eyes glint;
hazy rays catch rich institutions’ burnished gilding.
Night falls on folk fat and merry, lonely and lean.
The cat leaps.  Windows glow with a lemony tint.
In the darkness, people’s reflections disappear;
edifices are shades of coal and emery.
By night, people’s luminous private lives appear,
while day’s brilliant impressions fade to memory.

Categories
Poems

Our Hope Rises – A Rondeau


Our hope rises like a strong wind,
buoying us as we ascend
from gloomy fogs we’re loathe to fly
into a clear and better sky,
one where fewer troubles attend.

From lonely walks with tragic ends
to crowded tracks among cold friends
where we’ve left our own dreams to die,
our hope rises.

Even as we misapprehend,
stumble, fail at making amends,
and live a self-evident lie,
still, if we but honor and try
to be noble before life ends
our hope rises.

Categories
Poems

The Earth – A Sestina

The Earth
Our globe has more than mere water and land.
It has more than caps and boots of white snow,
more than a snaking navy cloak of sea,
more than a tawny belt of desert sand,
more than just gusts that the hidden wind blows,
and more than all the grass in a prairie.

For even when fire strips grass from prairie—
blackening the miles of once-golden land,
with ash swept as far as the hot wind blows—
even when spring’s buds are coated in snow,
and even when rich valleys turn to sand,
there is more potential in soil and sea.

There is regeneration. Sky to sea,
grass to ash, bones to dust: the wild prairie,
the austere mountains, and the humble sands
all change and renew as biomes of land.
The process is cold, delicate as snow,
and whirls through seasons just as the wind blows.

What will be from what has come. The old blows
of time, and the future we cannot see
together form renewal: a clean snow
that covers death in the wood and prairie,
leaves reviving water in thirsty land,
and brings tendrils from an infertile sand.

So even from unfruitful waste—the sand—
from pole to pole, so far as the wind blows,
each season breathes new life into the land.
Reefs made of dead oysters grow undersea,
while, on shore, fire revives the prairie,
and tundra is insulated by snow.

Ice ages come and cover Earth in snow.
Then time passes. Frost melts. Lakes become sand.
New species inhabit epic prairies.
And still, time passes. Winnowing winds blow.
Shorelines change, and bays are lost to the sea.
The treeless field becomes a wooded land.

So. Ephemeral are prairie and snow,
like shadows from land, like moisture from sand,
like a wind that blows the spray from the sea.

Categories
Poems

The Mountain – A Villanelle

The Mountain
There stands the snow-capped mountain, grave and bleak.
At the mountain’s foot are crows, black as coal;
hard-won triumph awaits you at the peak.

The dawn of the trial holds its mystique:
a challenge to pioneers who are bold.
There stands the snow-capped mountain, grave and bleak.

The trailblazer starts with certain technique,
but must break himself to make himself whole:
hard-won triumph awaits you at the peak.

By dusk of the trial, the sun seems weak.
The long day has grown dark, starless, and cold.
There stands the snow-capped mountain, grave and bleak.

But fight on, through the pain, the doubt, and shrieks.
Fight on, through the dismantling of your soul.
Hard-won triumph awaits you at the peak.

Keep hope inside when you’re too tired to speak,
and pay with your spirit every steep toll.
There stands the snow-capped mountain, grave and bleak.
Hard-won triumph awaits you at the peak.

Categories
Poems

The Ancient River – A Villanelle

The Ancient River
From a ridge, looking to a valley below—
one hazeled and shadowed by the sunrise,
with willows bending in the wind’s soft blow—

is an old river with a hooked oxbow.
Over it, the sun scumbles the cold skies
with her honeyed rays and pale, warming glow—

snuffing the stars, shortening the shadows,
eliciting a wood thrush’s sweet cries,
and thawing grass in the frosty hollow.

Beyond the horizon the river goes.
While ever-winding and wild its way lies:
now eddying in banks of ice and snow;

now coursing across a taiga’s meadows;
now sharpening a granite cliff’s sheer rise;
now beating rapids with its ceaseless blows.

Gone now are night and its fine indigo.
The gold sun illuminates the vale’s skies,
lighting the ancient river as it flows
into a future that nobody knows.

Categories
Poems

The Eagle

Gliding wild above a cold, churning sea
that roils, crashes, thunders, and hurls spray
over the gloomy shores and mist-wreathed trees,
is the eagle, taciturn bird of prey.
Over dank sands, on frosty winds it flies—
through icy sheets of foul, sleeting weather
that mantle the beach in a leaden shawl—
into the leafless, witchy trees of fall,
where it roosts awhile to preen its feathers.
Ravens croak, and barred owls soar through the sky.
The eagle coils, leaps, wings through twilight’s pall.

On frigid thermals the bald eagle flies,
wheeling through the squally, wintry weather
watching whitecapped seas with menacing eye,
then bolting, like lightning striking heather—
its grim wings cocked, its bearing primeval,
its aspect awful—toward the cheerless bay.
There the eagle, with savage sorcery,
magics a salmon from the heaving sea.
Through the sleet, the fish is borne away,
wriggling in sharp talons raptorial,
to a high, cold, windswept, bone-filled eyrie.

Categories
Poems

The Dancer

The dancer turns elegantly:
her pivot light and feathery,
her eyes as brilliant as a wren’s,
her lithe form swanlike as she spins
in ceremonial artistry.

The dance is life, felicity,
and also deep despondency.
Away from falls, time and again,
the dancer turns.      

The nimble dancer gracefully
moves to the places she should be:     
past the stages where dreams end,
to the theaters that love attends
where with airy vitality
the dancer turns.

Categories
Poems

A Cold, Snowy Road After Darkness

On a cold, snowy road after darkness
Come headlights that draw the eyes
Like a puppeteer’s wires.  Then comes the car,
Easing over pot holes and slick places.

One cannot see within it—if its driver is young,
Old, middle-aged, man, or woman.
Perhaps it does not matter.  The car is funereal,
Though not a hearse, and not black.

A house curtain is drawn taut then released.
Footsteps sound through the brightly lit home.
They stop by the door, to greet the driver, the bearer.
Nothing ever stays the same.  People come and go.

Folk pass through this world
Like a stream’s water coursing over a stone.
Love is found, nourished, and grows.
But justice is blind, fate is deaf,

And we must go on living,
Long after the elegy’s last notes are played,
Even while the heart languishes in sorrow.

Categories
Poems

New Spring

Spring has come and, with it, the mornings fragrant with lilacs
When light streams past freshly-leaved trees
To marble the moist earth.

We often walked this narrow path together,
From our home to the crest of the bare, blustery hill.
There we stopped to watch whitecaps and sea oats.

Nearly as often, we stayed home, nude in bed.
While the coffee percolated over a blue flame,
I kissed your ribs and breasts and touched your hair. 
The dogs lazed, and dust dappled the light beams.

But nostalgia and unrequited love make for blue memories;
They are like dull, serrated knives scratching at the heart.

I moved houses long ago, shook out the old ghosts
As if snapping a mat to rid it of dust.  Such phantoms
Are unwelcome companions for the jaunty spirit.

And I’ve presented myself to a future more modern:
Where artificial intelligence fights against cancer,
Where billionaires drive electric cars. 

Still—when spring blossoms, and the air’s sweet perfume
Is beholden to lilacs—involuntary memory recalls you.
I am holding a new lover’s  hand, so I take the reminiscence,
Put it gently back to rest, and move forward with her,
As the bright sun lights and warms our faces.

Categories
Poems

A Fire Burns in the Hearth

A fire burns in the hearth.
It is night, and the sky is clear.
The air is cold; the stars are bright;
The birches are leafless;
The ground is soft and rolling
Beneath a foot of new-fallen snow.

A man’s wet leather shoes,
Creased and furrowed with age,
Steam upon the stone hearth.
Near them, lying flat, are his wool socks,
Testaments to time outdoors.
By the socks are two feet,
One crossed over the other,
Soles to the flame.
Dry blue jeans and a plaid
Wool shirt cover him.
His eyes gaze into the fire.
The house is otherwise dark.

The stabled horses’ breath rises in the dark.
The old barn smells of oiled rope and hay.
Nickering, the young bay stamps her feet,
Then sidles nearer to the old palomino.

In a clearing in the middle of the yard
Stands an ancient sugar maple. Ice glazes
Its branches. When the morning
Sun comes, the tree will gleam and seem to shine.
It is an enormous tree, one estimated
To be two hundred years older than the
Hundred year old house. Like a cosmic phenomenon,
The tree draws things to it: Birds,
Squirrels, horses, dogs, and people.

Now a great-horned owl leaps
From the tree’s branches.
It flaps once, twice, thrice,
Then glides nearly a quarter mile.
The owl flies over the hoary mist
That floats above the frozen creek.
Then the owl is gone,
Disappearing into the pine forest that lies
Deep and cold and still,
Where in many minds
Mystery, horror, and romance
Still thrive in winter.

Categories
Poems

Stars

Stars are birthed in clouds.
Stellar nurseries:
Helium, hydrogen, heat; collapse.
Ka-boom.  Nascent stars scatter.
Pop pop pop: little lights populate
Our skies.  Ideas illumine
The human map, pinpricks of light
In shadowed minds: starlight,
Enlightenment, Orion,
Ontology, Modernism,
The Milky Way.  Constellations,
Philosophies chart courses
Across galactic oceans
And dark, moral seas.
Imagination: the distant bear, Ursa;
The Chippewa folk bear—
Both connect to creation. 
Humankind aligned to stars
Since times primordial,
From fairy tales to sailor’s sails,
And stars, like people, grow old.
They are born, shine awhile,
Give light, warmth, aid life,
Then die, and vanish
In the stream of Time.

Categories
Poems

A Good Man

I am a good man—
That’s what my employees all must say
(Or I’ll withhold their holiday bonuses
And have them working Christmas Day).

I am a good man—
For that you can take my girlfriend’s word
(And if my wife protests the sentiment,
Then, like me, pretend you never heard).

I am a good man—
I keep my word at any cost
(And all of those who say otherwise
Are just the losers and the lost).

I am a good man—
I am assured so every day
(And thus I find it very strange
That people don’t come my way).

Categories
Poems

Old Charts

The tea leaves are muddled; the lies are twice-told.
A lot and very little have changed. 
Folk are not called slaves but still they are sold,
And some marriages can still be arranged.

Still.  Still: Ignorance, as before, is poor.
It thieves, robbing both the foolish and wise.
And still, honest work makes a cherished core;
Since before the Greeks, such work has been prized.

Some metaphors remain too: Hope, the bird—
Whether caged or just a “thing with feathers”—
Has, as its strong song, the uplifting word;
Its wings fly one out of foulest weathers.

So, much is hard to parse: wild, chaotic.
But the human spirit remains so clear.
Amidst the coiling maelstrom psychotic
Are love and care: old charts by which we steer.

Categories
Poems

Perception

In the climactic anarchy of sex—
When the various passions are
Kaleidoscopic shards
Of colored glass,
scattered on a marver
For the gaffer
To roll a molten gob through—
Then disorder is at its most understandable.

Night lightning flashes,
Illuminating distant hills;
There’s a gasp of perception.
All the anarchy assembles
Into a sudden, coherent shape.
The forking, electric wires vanish.
Darkness falls again.

Groping, searching for a spark—
What lit
This planet’s immense and antres chamber,
Provided that brief, enlightening flame?
Later, when reflecting on that quick glimpse,
One already muddled,
She finds in it
Fatalism and independence,
Care, instinct, and hedonism:
The growth and transience
Of two human lives.

Categories
Poems

An Autumn Dell

When the thick rolling mists of September
Billow out among trees with leaves of gold
To lounge at the roots of needled timber,
And the afternoon air’s gilded with cold,

Then comes the hallowed season of autumn.
In this time, frosts rime grasses on a hill
And ice a slow stream’s course in the bottom
Of an old, majestic, and mountainous dell.

A scarlet cardinal trills in the still air
Deep within the mixed broadleaf and pine woods,
And an old croaking crow with feathers bare
Checks the soggy stump where she hoards her goods.

Shafts of dusty light pierce the canopy
To a moist forest floor littered with leaves;
This light reflects off the cobwebs’ dew
That beads the webs that ornament the trees.

It is damp, crisp, breezy.  Mushrooms abound.
Trees rot and furnish homes for worms and ants.
At dawn, the wet woodland wakes with dim sound,
And fogs seem as mournful as remembrance.

If the mist is a kind of deathly shroud,
Then drops of raw rain are like clear jewels,
Falling like crystals from high, icy clouds
To make the earth miry and fill the clear pools.

The rain and mists, the careful husbandry,
The bees’ stores of honeyed provender
Are set against the coming scarcity.
All’s precious in fall, for an end is near.

Categories
Poems

Orchids

Near numerous and luminous as stars,
And a sign of things healthy and morbid
(Depending on the case and cultivar),
Is the almost ubiquitous orchid.
A flower of finely perfumed fragrance,
It is stylish in every quick season:
To be found in buttonholes in romance
And, in mourning, adorning the coffin.
Not even the well-known, august rose
Can boast such flexibility and scope
Compared with the manifold forms of those
Orchids that stand both for grief and for hope.

Categories
Poems

That Evasive Spark

Passion is present in summer on lakes
Where the sun singes swimmers’ bronzed skin.
Carefree ardor may be increased with wine:
At table with olives, cheeses, and gin.
Even when unconscious there is desire,
Haunting—unwillingly, unsought—our dreams.
With lightning and loud thunder comes fervor:
The wilderness begets wildness, it seems.
But while July lakes, repasts, sleep, and storms
May each decorate a pretender’s stage,
Only love infuses into its making
That evasive spark that quickens each age,
That makes consequent the source of a boast
And raises creation to its utmost.

Categories
Poems

A Night-Time Stroll

While marveling at the starry sky
Where silver clouds scud and milky moon beams
In a firmament swathed in navy blue—

While exhausted folk slumber and dream,
Of fear or flight or of falling through space—

While the air smells of autumn, of trees, of smoke
And sounds of crickets, cicadas, and bold toads
Who sing in their want with chirps and hoarse croaks—

While descending the hill through low grasses
That run to the feet of an oak tree stand
Whose spectral aspect shadows the foot path,
There comes a turn and vista of the land:
There lies the distant village and spired church
The quiet houses and earthy, quaint lanes
Surrounded by arable pastures of wheat,
Rolling hills topped with rippling grains—

While on a solitary night-time stroll
Through rustling grass and the brisk, biting breeze,
In view of an old, wild, gleaming river,
There comes a worn, welcome feeling of ease.

Categories
Photography

Camel Train with the Moon Over the Mountains

Photos: Late afternoon, 31 August 2009, just south of Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan at the foothills of the Hindu Kush Mountains. Camels transporting grain from the city through the mountains.
Categories
Photography

Darul Aman Palace

Kabul, Afghanistan. 🇦🇫

Darul Aman Palace, Kabul, Afghanistan; 15 January 2010. The palace was damaged during the 1990s by Mujahideen during the Afghan Civil War. The building has since been restored.

I took all the photos. I intend to post more photos on this site, in addition to contributing new poetry. For Muslims, today is a day of celebration: Eid al-Fitr. Eid Mubarak.

Categories
Poems

Eternal Love

Though even love between a man and wife
Can die, still love as a quality lives.
Love surpasses all close understanding.
It outlasts the rare, few sands that time gives,
For love revives anew every moment.
As often as it’s snuffed, it’s lit again.
It cannot be decisively put out.
Love is eternal and has always been.
It is passed through countless generations,
Between all diverse aspects of mankind,
Between folk and beast and tree and bright star—
In all ages and lands, there is love, we find.

Categories
Poems

In the Tented Field Beneath a Wild Sky

Years past, the tented field was one of war
With cloudbursts of bombs and grave, martial light.
Though those times ever, unwelcome, appear
They are not now here, and the field is bright
Beneath a northern sky flashing colors
Of electric shades in the weird gloaming.
For these tents lie beneath a grand aurora
Whose lights, like sailors, are ever roaming.

And what lights!  Like nebulas brought near us,
They make a great glow of serpentine greens,
Blushing pinks, coronary golds, purples
Whose hues before appeared only in dreams.
Such wild and brawling hues that fly by dusk
Make, like dread skies of war, mankind feel slight—
But whereas war’s thunderheads bring horror,
Nature’s aurora brings awe and delight.

Categories
Poems

The Dark Blesséd Night

While merrily drunk on proud vintages,
While the dark new moon lies cloaked behind clouds,
While clean, industrious folk sleep and dream,
And the idle markets await their crowds,
Together we forget the coming dawn,
Who daily disrespects our mortal race
With her honest rays and revealing beams
That shine such hard light on each aging face.

Instead we clothe ourselves in nudity—
In the habit as that which we were born—
And sport in an echo of our lost youths
From which ease, increasingly, we are torn,
And, hiding ourselves upon each other,
Make as though night shall ever cloud the streets
Whose welcome blindness will never censure
Our maturing souls or our tumbled sheets.

Categories
Poems

Bees

When spring comes, the huddled bees clamber forth
From their cold, vulnerable colonies,
To feel the parting nip of late winter,
Savor the freshness of the vernal breeze,
And stretch their wings after the snowy cloister.
It is a time for scouts to find new hives,
A time for wild, swarming reproduction,
For rearing young bees to replace old lives.

A long-dead tree, standing in a vale’s hollow
With a deep cavity in its gnarled trunk—
A tree surrounded by rich broadleaf forest
That’s populated by boar, elk, and skunk—
Makes a worthy home for the nesting bee
Whose queen’s needs she must mindfully mark,
Whose summer combs will ooze melliferous,
And whose life is forfeit to the hive’s arc.

To make her claim, the bee must make her dance:
A robust and energetic gyration
That tells of her proud stake in the wooded chamber
And coaxes others to its location.
With zealous effort she wins the vote
Of the hive’s fascinated queen and drones,
Then, in glory, she leads a swarm of thousands,
Through pale glens to her queen’s modest throne.

There the settling bees establish their hive.
There is much to do, and no time to wait. 
Waxy, hexagonal combs must be built
For the larvae and honey they’ll create.
A resinous mix of saliva and wax
(Used as a sealant and called “propolis”)
Is applied to the cracks and crevices
Of the bees’ growing metropolis.

And of course, the virgin must be mated,
For she shall be the mother of all bees:
Those to be born in the coming days,
And who’ll be the life of the colony.
Like in a dream, the queen’s mated in flight
(Best on warm, sunny days with a blue sky)
By drones who won’t gather pollen, or nurse,
Or build, or anything—save mate, and die.

From these singular males, in but one flight,
The newly mated queen keeps in her belly
Fertile stores to last the rest of her life,
Which consists of eating royal jelly
And the vital task of reproduction:
Egg-laying, fertilizing, sex control,
For it’s the queen that manages the lists
Of sexes that the working hive enrolls.

Summer comes and goes.  The female workers
Build, gather, nurse, clean, and make sweet honey.
The male drones laze far from the busy hive
On days that are hot, languid, and sunny.
The world revolves.  Trees start to lose leaves.
Autumn’s chill winds come with a rustling sigh.
In fall, the gluttonous, idle male drones
Are expelled from the hive and left to die.

The hive’ll be a buzzing sphere of females
When, once more, winter comes with ice and snow,
And at that sphere’s center the queen shall rest:
Heated by trembling bees in her hollow.
In fallow days the bees live on their stores
On honey that to their cells they did bring,
As they shiver throughout the cold winter
And keenly await the coming of spring.

Categories
Poems

Spring

Enlivening winter’s landscapes
Whose snow and icy mists shroud grey tombs,
Leave tables bare, and stop rushing rivers,
Comes spring with fresh designs drawn with age-old plume.
Spring’s first sketches seem earth-toned and modest:
Skeleton drawings of green and brown twigs
Among the lowing cattle’s bogged pastures
On whose fenceposts yet hang a holly sprig.

And as early spring’s watery dawns break
Over slushy ponds fringed with leafless trees—
The long-held icicles melt drop-by drop,
The soggy soils sprout mushroom colonies,
And the craftsman with claw hammer and nails,
Ruddy cheeks, long straight white beard, and clear eyes,
Sets from his home to build a grape arbor:
A springtime gift for his beloved wife—

As the sun shines on these longed-for changes
(And others: plum trees with their nascent bloom,
A promise of new fruit, elk waiting to calve
The wondrous life that grows within their wombs),
Spring avails herself of her soft pastels.
Where wild ducks lay their creamy speckled eggs
Amongst the tall reeds of moist, muddy marshes,
Spring overpaints winter’s neutral-hued dregs,

And where banks were lately glazed with thin ice—
And morning mist rose from the lake’s surface
As bewitched smoke rises from a mirror—
Spring washes the scene with lilac crocus,
Canary yellows, and magnolia pinks.
With different hues on each hair of her brush
Spring lightens and colors sky, land, and beast,
Rendering the cold, fallow land warm and lush.