Don't mind me - I'm just trying to find the corner of these woods, the angled location where the roots connect and I expect its location remains secret for a reason, one I won't be obliged to share here
for #mastoprompt
A place to gather words before they get lost.
Don't mind me - I'm just trying to find the corner of these woods, the angled location where the roots connect and I expect its location remains secret for a reason, one I won't be obliged to share here
for #mastoprompt
Three ravens, resting on the top branch of the tree, break the summer quiet
for Algot
I am a poet of little precision
Lazy, maybe, or languorous, one might say -
I write words in a burst, then wander away
for #mastoprompt
It's enough to believe in the beauty of his eighty eight keys
but Keith Jarrett's guttural humming - talking – singing to himself keeps me coming back to jazz
His piano playing contains gentle attacks then some unexpected silence that fill in the gaps
for #mastoprompt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCSQbxzJyoU
Their adopted habitat becomes their hallways and classrooms, lockers and lunchrooms, playgrounds and fields
Wandering in search of connection and friendship, ideas and mischief, and always, permission to be who it is they are becoming -
Invasive species, they are, but always welcomed as curiosities from the start, taking seed like vines inside the labyrinths of our hearts,
only to arrive at the day when they become un/uprooted from the grounds on which they have covered, and then gone, disappeared -
Approaching summer seems, then, like fallow fields, but soon enough, another crop of adolescent interlopers suddenly, like clockwork, reappears
for #mastoprompt and the end of the school year (nearly here)
The Things I Don't Know About Nebraska
The things I don't know about the state of Nebraska are deep enough to fill a box with pages of discarded poems, meandering and more winding than the Platte River running through the Plains
but when wandering the maps, running fingers over the flat lands of corn country, what I wonder most: who carved out the corner and gave the empty container to Colorado, and why?
In my mind, I imagine scenes of resistance, the fight of it, the proud Nebraskans waving pitchforks and rifles at these greedy neighbors, the grabby ones who carved up the land in spite of it
or I see incompetent bureaucrats, unable to discern lines through wind and water, and calling it a day before the day could even begin, checkmarks in the box, filed away with right, angles, wrong
and it's been said, so I've read, how some of those who live in the northern panhandle today like to dip toes on the border lines one way, to call it the West, and others, the other way, to call it Midwest,
while the most Nebraskans of all just carry on, finding strength in the solitude and in silence of their beloved land, bordered only by its beauty, calling it ... home
Seeds of stories and poems,
scattered like confetti along the edges of a map -
the fertile place where ideas take root, then flourish
for #mastoprompt
Flowers of the valley blooming in abundance
a soft light set against an otherwise stark landscape of hard angles
for #mastoprompt
Every small step we take on this earth has consequences ....
— from How to Catch a Mole (A Life Lived In Nature) by Mark Hamer
We try to amplify the good that is in the earth, mostly by leaving it alone.
— Terry Elliott, via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFfeewL-Aw8
I have too often failed in travels to leave not even footprints, trodding through fields and woods on excursions of wonder
I am, after all, a trace, a destruction machine, laced up from boot to head with eyes shadowed by cap's brim
It's in the pause, in the stop, where reminders become evident when I know I am not nearly enough and still, doing what I can
One poem, I left imprinted in dirt, then sat by in night's storm, watching the wind of the world at work, knowing we are ephemeral ink, fleeting
video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0VM9MQkSak