"moiled" poems
Fall is an empty street in Rome,
Of byways of dry-leaf stone and moth-haunted hours,
Of market stalls with their over-haggled and fingered rinds,
And melons moiled over and palmed and bruised.
The light blows like once-told ripeness from the basket of fruit.
Jun 1, 2019
Jun 1, 2019 at 9:29 PM UTC
Grandfather's house, knocked to the ground - to dust:
The windows wept when the bulldozer came
Timeworn and ***** and wheezing black smoke,
Just like the drab mills where grandfather moiled.
Children play in the intriguing debris
Where, once, children played on the garden path,
Where grandfather told stories of past things
And the children listened wide eyed, in awe.
The door remains standing, creaking, ajar,
As it yawns in the twilight of the gloom
And the children knock though no one answers
So, they run away for, why should they stay?
Abandoned now, no one, near here, comes by
Except myself in the patience of night
As I tap on the door, though softly now,
Grandfather answers and dolefully smiles.
Aug 15, 2022
Aug 15, 2022 at 3:20 AM UTC
I wonder what the rabbit sees
when she passes through my backyard
garden. Catholic eyes that have canonized
nature’s wild mane
of vulcan brush and misty rain
does she think my sunflowers are just as beautiful?
and the rolling prairies of my
domesticated bend of the turnpike
are they just like the valleys she has
foraged through, beside the
shivering streams and
creepycrawling things, I
wonder if my nature is enough for her own
is the ant hill in my backyard garden still
sweet as the labor of the mountainspine
makes you sweat, admire the
dappled blueberries and
dark deer droppings
side by side, I once ate the deer’s own by accident and
I couldn’t tell the difference
but she is still just a rabbit and
has only seen the grocer’s slivered aisle of the world, she
hasn’t heard the wolf cry to the
violette moon
(god’s own thumbnail, mama used to say), or
smelled the dogwood in April
heard the mourning-song of the morning humpback while
the plowman’s humble dinner stays
salted by his moiled earthsoiled toilsweat
cried in the summershine of noontime Arizona rising and
laughed into the Amazon’s hair
stood tall on the moors, stood tall and faced the
edge of the world
kicked up the fertile dust of the African enterprise or
powdered her frosted nose alongside crystalline Mongols, no
she is just a rabbit, and I want to tell her all the secrets
Gaea has yet to murmur, low
but she is just a rabbit, and she sees my backyard garden
this wide world
and that is enough, for her own
Mar 15, 2018
Mar 15, 2018 at 4:40 PM UTC