wheat field

In the time needed to bat an eye

You come and go; a perfume of a sigh

Touching skin in gentle furrows

Unknowing strands of your hair.

By sensation, a trace and image

Linger, so fleeting yet firm;

a memory made of fractioned time.

Convincing as any reality

I continue to see the glimmered

light and golden strands.

I think of wandering through a field

Ripe soft wheat expressing the winsome winds

Ahead, the blue sky frames edges of the trees

To making mounds and hills of leafy boughs

And to whistled brush of winds that speak

In a welcoming tongue, we run as if entranced

And footfalls make a dance of eager smiles.

Field’s end, we fall into moistened shade

And detect the laughter of a nearby brook

As body heat dissembles mossy ground into a bed,

I roll over to face full red lips;

 in a moment that cannot yet decide

Whether to bridge to ground or sky.

a cosmic watch

The wind gave life

To spots of dark and light-
brushed voices in the trees.

As the motion of distant stars

Turned the face of night

into a cosmic watch.

So little did time matter

and yet it was all, 

for in the sight of a petty man,

a speck within a mote;  

the bend of the world

bore a pregnant dawn.

Yet he too swims

in the eternal sea, 

flung on a vast tide beyond sight

imaginings and memory.

It was the wind

that made silence stir

and the lift of spirit

brought a prayer across

his ever expectant lips

waiting , waiting for fire 

and a blessing.

By the few…

Something unseen by the many, yet

always seen and deeply felt by the few,

has suddenly become all that everyone can see-

the killings of Black men by police violence in America.

It flashes like fire around the shrinking globe

like lightning unto an epiphany, so many can suddenly…see.

For the few it has meant a blood-boiling fury

that melts the rock of resistance , and thunders in the heart.

It inspires rebellions of thought that spew

Through the hard crust of the world; a fire

That mere reason cannot contain, for existence

Is the imperative of life, and in this brutality

the already flimsy filament of life

is a flickered candle in a ceaseless wind.

It is, after all, the lives of our children hung

In this balance; the cruel harvests on hard Ferguson streets

Or a tranquil park in Cleveland flowed

In unforgettable red in Baton Rouge…the red that leaves

Fire in the eyes and a cramp in the voice.

Now, suddenly, everyone can see,

Through eyes that swell to verge,

For It hurt no less in Dallas; it is life-

in all of its precious forms and fragility-

And it is a terrible thing to waste.