David MurphySummer’s Shades
After spring’s pastels come summer orange.
Like a glaze, lilac hardens to purple,
carnation pink deepens to a rose tinge;
and powder blue turns cobalt, deep and full.
While on branch and twig, birds sing, perch, or cringe –
sweet songs praising, perhaps, shades bright or dull.
In summer the birds soar o’er prairies singed
by a sun that dyes grass like golden wool.
Like through a syringe, bright colors Time pulls,
while the moon, white skull, illumes the night strange.
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.
A poem about the butterfly migration.
A swarm of butterflies in a forest glen
Fly out from the shadows then swoop back in
They fly through shafts of falling sunlight
And the dust motes that trickle from the trees’ great height.
The forest is fragrant with the scent of fresh pine.
Spider webs are strung, gossamer and fine.
Orange mushrooms grow beneath a dead log,
And the mornings are blanketed by a damp fog.
Old elk walk stately along a river bed
As the butterflies flutter around their antlered heads,
And the river goes rippling past the old, quiet stones
While the butterflies make their migration home.
