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.
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.
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.
Astrophysics In the night sky, light years far, my mother and father's ghosts are two constellations that share half of their stars
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.
Reflection In the mirror, I'm the elder who shelters the wild and frightened Indian child who still resides inside of me.
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.
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.
Always a treat to come across your poetry, Sherman! There's something about them that grab me by the throat. I was particularly struck by "O, we humans love to think that the sacred is stable."
Your love poems are exquisite.
They make my heart jump.