A Shimmer of Blue

eight short poems

Photo by davisuko on Unsplash

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Pilgrims


After one thousand days
of grey, a shimmer of blue. 
I'd withstand one thousand

unanswered prayers
to spend a few hours
of naked faith with you.

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The Waking


The dead don't always apologize
before they die. And we, the living,
don't always apologize to the dead
before they're ushered into whatever
show comes next. So it's good to know

that, no matter how many apologies
go unsaid, and no matter how
profoundly each of us might suffer,
we the living and we the dead often
do our best to forgive one another.

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Orchard 


Slice an orange
and feed me

by hand.
I'll eat the citrus

down to the rind.
Then I'll press

my mouth
against yours

and share all 
the sweetness

that you
can bear.

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Astrophysics 

In the night sky,
light years far,

my mother and father's ghosts

are two constellations 
that share half of their stars 

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Natural Causes


I knew a man
who fell off
a cliff and died.

He was a poet
so dozens
of other poets

rough drafted
metaphors
about suicide.

 

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Reflection


In the mirror, I'm the elder
who shelters the wild 

and frightened Indian child
who still resides inside of me.

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All the Forms of Hunger


When you're starving,
you'll break

any bone, wide
or narrow,

to give you
room enough

to feast
on the marrow.

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Lincoln County


Driving through familiar farmland
with my wife, I name the former
high school classmates who once

tilled those fields. But almost all
of those kids left the family
farms and moved to various cities.

Their parents are now far too old
to still be working the harvest
so I guess they probably sold

all their acres and retired.
O, we humans love to think
that the sacred is stable

but time constantly rearranges
the world and fills our childhood
fables with hard-working strangers.