Regrowth

Originally published in Ever Eden Literary Journal Summer 2019.

“They say that heavy pruning can kill a plant,
take too much at the wrong time,” he prodded
the ancient rosebush with his toe.  The stem
was thick and gnarled from regrowth, dead wood
and green beside each other in a tangled
mass, but now there were no leaves.  He shook
his head, “you should have waited till the flowers
finished blooming.”
The boy blushed a rose
across his freckled cheeks.  “I didn’t mean
to hurt it, saw you do the same.”
He shrugged.
“We can replant if worst things come to worst.”
When the man left, the boy cried all the same
like sap that oozes from a broken shoot.
Heavy pruning sometimes kills a plant,
but green and dead a man always regrows.

Sourdough

Originally published in Ever Eden Literary Journal Summer 2019.

There is leaven in her quiet house,
on surfaces in need of dusting.  She
knows well to wait.  It is nothing she
can add to make the meal and water grow.
What spirit blesses the bread she doesn’t know,
but it blows life within the hollow crust.
Heavy, she pats the rounding of her belly
and hides the leaven in three measures, one
for him within her growing, one for the father
she has not seen, and one for faith, the yeast
of knowing things unseen and yet believed.

“You May Die Young and Tired or Old” and “I Am Glad That Beauty Must Pass Away”

Both poems can be found online here.

Birches

Originally published in Dappled Things Summer 2019.

He made the woods and birches lithe and white
amid the green.  When Adam saw them, then
he knew his maker would make him Eve.  And, she,
a speaking rib, a torn side lanced, a flood
was born from him as water and the blood.

That the creator would attend to things
so small and presage there a world renewed,
that he would build a bride again in blood
and water flowing form the side of God,
is scarcely comprehensible at all
to me, a rib broken by man’s fall.

Dandelions

Originally published in Dappled Things Summer 2019.

“Did you see the dear I hit?” He said.
“She left a fawn in the wild roses there
beside the road.”
I nodded and looked grim.
He was going home and stopped to ask
about my sheep.
“How’s the new lamb?”
“Yes,
she’s fine,” I said, “but the mother’s teet is bad.”
“Mastitis then?”
“Perhaps.  We’ll have to see.
I hate to bottle-feed another lamb.”

He stamped the clutch and looked across the lane
again.  “She was a fine doe, wouldn’t want
her in my flowerbeds.”
No, nor I
in lettuce that we planted at the farm.
But out behind the fence, she did no harm.

“I was looking for dandelions,” I said,
“when I saw her beyond the pasture line.
Her fawn was barely the first fence beam high.
I moved, and as a vision, they were gone.”
He nodded, “It’s a shame she died, the fawn
as good as dead as well.”  We both knew
and sighed.  At least the lamb would be kept alive.

Ordinary Time

The following was originally published in Ever Eden Literary Journal Winter 2020.

The air is ripe with Christmas trees, dried out,
needling the sidewalk and careless passersby.
To see, you’d think a forest had been felled
on Ross, a glade of evergreens; the woods
of Dunsinane are come to Dallas just
to die.  But no.  Their spirit lingers on
polluted air; the ghost of Christmas, smell
of Douglas firs is everywhere.  You can’t
escape the thoughts of childhood that come tripping
in—the wolf beneath the tree, the bike,
the longed for set of Legos or the doll.
Thrown out upon the sidewalk all our lives
are there, and we pass by, never saying
we too sense the invisible scent or care
to see our memory composted with
the desiccated Douglas firs of Christmas.