I saw a little girl plant a tree
on a beach by a watchful lapping sea;
her mother dug the hole
and by lark I guess covered in the tree.

To their sturdy neighborhood, I then saw them go:
to family, friends, perhaps we may say too
one to a moon-dipped lover, lulling by the shore.

Skip and hop, spin and swirl, laugh aloud, hand-in-hand,
bare-foot princesses dancing through august light.
Whatever cares they share hidden by delight.


I will remain, I think, with the tree.
Soon and carefully I will take it
to a place of loving worms in dark, moist earth,
to dig it a home free of the watching, lapping sea.


© 2016

It may all depend
On the silliness of a boy
Sitting on the roof of a car
In a graveyard,
In the gentle shade
Of a summer afternoon.


© 2016

The house, old and gray,
Sits back in a field
As houses did then,
Before cars came to compress the day.

From here I see the woods,
The river’s run, the spiral of the valley
Under clouds of rolling snow
To the road the machines come through.

I think I will stay here tonight
To keep company with the house,
And recreate the goodness of our small love,
To be ready for them when they come.

Yet I fear when they come
I will only say I came to watch
Machines destroy a house
Built with someone else’s small love.


© 2016

Quiet now.
The children are dead.
Do you understand?
The children are dead.

Words you see,
Just words, you see, you hear.
But do you understand?
The children are dead.

We are responsible.
Do you understand?
The children are dead.
Shot.

We have loss our right to speak.
Quiet now.
Tonight in Newtown
Children are dead.



© 2016

Brown leaves sparse caught
To gray trees reflected in the river
Running under winter light
Cold, hard, blue, to ice
To mist, to the sea.


© 2016

Morning frost lambently fine
Beneath a sky of madder and blue
Wheel gulls crying foul
To a fleeting packet of cold silver food.
The same they sounded
As Joyce did listen, once upon a time.


© 2016

And in between the ice and the fire we created,
And the creations were poor but some we used,
And those we remembered,
And in our best moments built upon them,
So in the time between the ice and the fire,
We became those creations,
Because they were all we were allowed to be,
As if something would not let us move beyond them,
For some reason or perhaps for no reason,
For it may be blind and moves without knowledge,
Other than the need to move to the next ice or fire.


© 2016