"timbered" poems
They gathered by Williamson Road at sun-up
from neighboring spreads across the Tioga valley.
They came with carts laden with lumber stacks -
with saws, adzes, hammers and sundry tools.
They gathered with the homesteaders bond.
to co-build their neighbor's' dreams.
Sweet music of community echoed off the hills.
Chisels clanged into rock, shaping the foundation,
saws sang into boards to frame a timbered skeleton.
The staccato syncopation of hammers fastened walls
that soon would shelter plowshares, stock and grain.
A smithy leaned over his fire and forge -
chiming iron into sturdy latches and hinges.
Children scurried about mixing squeals and laughter
with exuberant fetching and lifting whenever called.
In two short passings of the sun the deed was done
and a handsome new barn, decked out in a wash of red
was silhouetted tall and proud against the fading light.
Homesteaders gathered at a celebration table
to share a hearty meal adorned by the music
of fiddles, grateful smiles and easy laughter.
Then one by one they steered their wagons home
gazing back at what their labors had wrought -
knowing to the depth of their communal souls
that we are more together than we are apart
Listen up, America! This is the music of community.
We are more together than we are apart.
© 2016 by Robert Charles Howard
Jul 31, 2016
Jul 31, 2016 at 10:16 AM UTC
timber habitats are vanishing, on the Earth's mass
timber habitats are vanishing, on the Earth's mass
bulldozers and axes, lethal their mix
bulldozers and axes, lethal their mix
on the Earth's mass, bulldozers and axes
vanishing timber habitats, lethal their mix
the number one priority, where is the preserving and conserving
the number one priority, where is the preserving and conserving
tree dwelling creatures, served eviction from their homes
tree dwelling creatures, served eviction from their homes
preserving and conserving, tree dwelling creatures homes
from eviction, the number one priority
tree felling goes on unabated, wooded residencies destroyed
tree feeling goes on unabated, wooded residencies destroyed
profits to be ever reaped, satiating the logger's greed
profits to be ever reaped, satiating the logger's greed
unabated the logger's tree felling goes on
satiating greed destroyed, wooded residencies reaped
wood residencies destroyed, on the Earth's mass
served eviction from their homes, tree dwelling creatures
timbered habitats are vanishing, the number one priority
profits to be ever reaped ,bulldozers and axes lethal their mix
tree felling goes on unabated, satiating the logger's greed
where is the preserving and conserving?
Jul 20, 2014
Jul 20, 2014 at 9:37 AM UTC
Everyone has an opinion, my son.
And their words will push and shove you
To the left and to the right,
Towards earth and towards heaven.
Should others be your root which holds you to reality,
You will have an anchor which sways with the tides,
A bridge timbered upon clouds,
And a house founded upon shifting sands.
Thus to pursue what is True and Good,
You must trust your own eyes.
For though they will lie from time to time
Another’s eyes cannot fit within your sockets
Sep 7, 2021
Sep 7, 2021 at 12:48 PM UTC
Fog Happens
Yup. Not profound, even Jung, Kant and Freud,
wouldn’t deny their eyes, would no doubt disagree
with symbolic, philosophical implications, and the
head banging ramifications for the immediacy of
the spiritual impact while driving in this grey ****
Fog differs every time, and on an island, that’s for
**** sure. Today’s incarnation, the fog comes over
the water, but respects the man-made, timbered,
bulkhead, so the yard, with its circus of ravens, crows,
and other invisible birds, insects, rabbits, is visible,
but absent the inhabitants who are smarter-than-humans,
they remain aboded thinking, only stupid humans believe
they can navigate and forage, in a fog penetrating in air
that is 97% humidity and 100% peas soup thick skinned.
The time? Of course.
It’s 7:36 AM on the East Coast, and beyond the lawn lies a brackish bay that will lead you to the Atlantic and north to the Titanic, direction Newfoundland. Not enough info to geo tag me, but those who know me, knowledgeable in my early mornings scribblings, know my whereabouts, my telephone number. Do you?
Fog Happens to everyone and at random intervals, Nope. Not thinking of the brain clouds of ordinary Lethologica and Lethonomia. (Sunday lazy so just look it up and say out loud, gotta remember them words and laugh out loud cause you ain’t gotta a prayer.)
Fog Happens
in the heart, spreading north to the consciousness, and the lethargy of movement impeded by the lighthouse bells tolling “danger is about,” our light stolen, but you need to know, you’re perilously close to danger. Any action taken when heart-fogged can have awful consequences so stick close to bed, yank out your tablet, write a poem, listen to sad love songs on that Pandora Station, or send GIPHYs and emojis to your six year old granddaughter who is 108 miles to the west of where you both hide beneath coverlets, and laugh out loud with her like the bells chiming outside, and that helps move that heart~fog hanging low, out to sea.
YUP.
Fog Happens
Fog Passes
Jun 25, 2023
Jun 25, 2023 at 8:00 AM UTC
I am cage fights with boys and girls alike
I am splintered hardwood floors
kneeling/crawling/hard working
indoor/outdoor
day/night.
I am balled fists
Open palms
I am Chains and
a footstool timbered from my back.
A rent boy with vices
I am violence/dicord/visceral
Bloodied and mean.
A machine built of sinew
made for binding/unbinding
lashing and flogging
I am a service receptacle
a boy built of honour
of instinctual intellect
of bruises and bandages
i am cut and torn
roped and worn.
Feb 9, 2010
Feb 9, 2010 at 2:20 AM UTC
denuded of cover
she stands all alone
without a leaf
upon her timbered bones
above in sombre grey skies
an uncaring sun hides
winter's whipping wind
lashes her hide
there she shivers
for want of warm light
there she quivers
through the gelid days and nights
the bitter iciness
ever staying
with the freezing vetch
so cruelly parlaying
the end doth call
she dies
she dies
she dies
in winter's cold pall
Nov 25, 2013
Nov 25, 2013 at 8:28 PM UTC
I’m trying to recall a poem or a prayer that I recited
while walking through the woods of my hometown.
It occurs to me that I’ll never get it back.
I suppose such things are meant to be transient,
spoken out loud and left to drift,
But I am determined to capture some of it.
So. Here in the woods
Branches droop heavy and black with berries.
I pluck to gather them and make of my hands
two cups from which saltwater spills.
I see a vision of the old and the new,
the here to come and the hereafter,
overlaid on the thick pine stumps.
That which has passed is not yet gone.
Like trees, we grow on the rotten bones of giants.
There is no king of the once and future,
Nay, nor queen. Only the rough tumult
of life that continues, and abates, and continues.
Here on the holly branch the spines sharpen.
The red berries have not ripened from black.
On the thorns I see blackberries still **** and red,
not yet sweet with concentrated sunshine.
I see the skulls of snag trees, the knothole eye sockets
where woodpeckers find their mealy dinners
and feast on the beetles and worms –
which shall in their turn one day feast on me.
So it goes, as it should be, as it will.
My vision shows oak giants long passed,
toppled and timbered an age before my time.
A thousand years hence they shall rise again.
Fear not; the axes of men wreak havoc,
but may only interrupt the flow, not halt it.
Again I stoop to pluck the fruit
And form two cups of my hands
From which juice flows like water.
The ocean licks the sweat from my skin
And I see a vision of the old woods,
the old ways, the elder magick
That will grow from seed tomorrow.
Hew my limbs in history, bury them in timber.
Let the barrow-mounds be a nursery
Where the thornbush harvest grows.
Sep 2, 2022
Sep 2, 2022 at 9:41 PM UTC
“To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late
And how can man die better
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods”
Soft murmurs along the front line crackle like a broken prairie plough,
The maples and oaks snapping with
Every burst of the cannon.
Crested breaths choked out by
The ferocious blasts of this entrenched
Jungle.
Shrieks punctuate the deathly silence,
And sobers the divisions thirst for war.
I, a dead soul among the living.
The soft wind at night is the nefarious fingers of death,
Soaking the earth and ****** boughs
Of the old oaks with the veins
Of golden purity.
(I am standing on an eagles skull.)
I can hear the Rebel yell beyond the tree line,
BLASTING the barreling notion of liberty,
Stacked within our Union souls.
A Bundren coffin takes form in the mist beyond the wasteland.
My kin lay wait at home,
Shall I return one day and parade through pastures
And creeks until the days grow old
and so shall I.
With kin side by side.
My vacant mind floats off to distant lands along the
timbered forests of the Free North.
Orations from my Grandfather resonate like wind chimes
Rattling among the inner confines of my sanity,
Strewn images flash like the lines of Virginian regulars,
A sparse reminder of my ever so soon fate
In the Wilderness.
Apr 14, 2018
Apr 14, 2018 at 5:32 PM UTC
As I sit and look out
I see the trees leaves dance in majestic rhythm
Moved by the wind the sun glistens and fills up the space between natures flow
Soft rustle to the ears comforts from days cares
Bird settles in timbered bough
Air sounds as sea shore
Waves swish in the breeze
Psithurism
such
setting
serenity
Sep 12, 2017
Sep 12, 2017 at 10:55 AM UTC
did because i well jeez 10:23 farther steeper i'd was a outside 10:24 a junebug
is creaking on the well like a fine cylinder. it's because steeper or 10:27 clunking
a light of amiable is sort of. at 10:31 a common a cool the. into if.
a very sorry long is diacriticly loose with the scab of lunging trees
by the barn 10:31:53 is . it's was almost because i did i well jeez
the june is a crimped fine determined juice. did it seem because or and a breif
i s haloed somewhat or creaking a junebug is big for by the stalls shuffling with legs in the sort of barn by the 10:36 it's gabled a bit. or does it seem a because well did i and meyou. pm well it were 10:37 and longest brown is seemingly. otherwise unmarked a phonetic element. by a 10:39PM leafing softly
the scuttle a. unnerved little scraping. beneath or metatarsaled cadence a the grassed stripping earth went from the basest mouth of timbered certainly to the unskinniest blue. a vanity of wheels or because well did i jeez
Mar 9, 2011
Mar 9, 2011 at 12:19 PM UTC
I found five weasels in a wood,
Five grey kits so fierce they stood,
in challenge on the timbered trail,
my urgings all to no avail.
They held their ground as if to say
This darkling path on which I stray
Is weasel-wood, a tracking ground
Where silent death waits all around
And, transgressing here I truly fear
So ends my trekking here this year.
Apr 17, 2012
Apr 17, 2012 at 9:47 PM UTC
To the east
To the sundered east
Of the deserted Isle
Their lies a wrack
black timbered bones
Scold clinging clams
That harbour there
In the Wrack of the Isle
As she lies down
They say
In hushed wispers
it happened
Many years ago
Men died
Or so they say
But now, no one really knows
It's all been forgotten now
Through foggy years of
Sun and Snow
And dirth the man
Who can name her
The wrack rises
To the waters
To greet the
High airs above
The darlking deep beneath
Where once there was a love
Who can say, now
When looking at the wrack
In its black longingness
That once, it was a brightened
Vessel, fine and new
Filled with laughter
And simple joys
They dive there sometimes
When the tides allow
But divers have to be wary
It's dangerous near
Wrack waters, so easy
To be pulled down and
Within, you go
And once in her shell
The air can not sustain
You, for it is
Not for breathing
Creatures
Remember the shore
They tell
The newcomers
You must remember
Where it is
To the west you
Must go, and so on....
But carefully,
The wrack will
Call at you
Softly, and slow
Breathing liquid fumes
That fill the lungs
And crush the ribs
I swam round her once
It was a heady -
Experience, all shoreline
Was forgotten
I was lured by her
Cracked spars and
Speckled beams
So beautiful
Beneath a shining sea
But I learned there
That no man may
Swim the wrack
Forever, and not forget
Deep death there awaits
And lies down
With you
In a wet grave
So be forwarned
Before you swim
The wrack of the Isle
To the East
The sundered East.
May 3, 2014
May 3, 2014 at 1:44 PM UTC
In my mind your fingers were in the gaps of my fingers
we were holding onto timbered dreams of romance
then the floorboards disappeared from underneath
and I am in this weathered storm left thinking-
that somehow someway I wish you could...
I wish you could find a way to love me as I have you...
but the only words that come out speak silence-
'you are beautiful' because that's all I wanted to let you hear.
Theres an ember lighting a pile of papers
that seems to turn rustic a foundation of solid ground
and right now- I'm wondering if love is real,
because if it's real, why does it hurt so much?
Maybe I just wanted the soft illusion to stick a little longer,
maybe I'm not great, maybe I'm not good,
maybe I wasn't trying hard enough,
or maybe I just wasn't enough-
but I do know that ...
I miss you...
not in the way we built our relationship-
I don't miss you in the way that you went to work,
or I went to school...
I miss you in the way that I won't get another chance to miss you,
so I miss you-
but the sun shines on my face,
and I wish I could say its familiar shape stings my eyes,
but right now - I wish I was blind,
I wish I was blind, deaf, and could not talk.
Just so I can say - this is close to death- and I like it.
Jun 18, 2017
Jun 18, 2017 at 6:26 PM UTC
The lure of gold brought Fifty-Niner’s in droves
to the Kansas-Nebraska territory
laden with packs, picks, pans and shovels -
hell-bound for adventure and facile wealth.
Placer miners squatted beside frigid streams,
dipping their pans and filling their sacks
with nuggets bound for the assayer's verdict.
Mine towns sprang up where the veins were strong.
In ******* Creek, Leadville, Independence and Central City,
the valleys rang with the strident cacaphony of
drills and explosives - burrowing shafts deep
into the ore-rich valleys and mountain slopes.
Headlamps lit and shadowed mazes of timbered tunnels
where men piled rock high into mine cars
headed for the mammoth crushers at Idaho Springs.
Whiskey freely flowed in saloons and hotels
where raucous miners let off steam with
every mode and cast of ***** talk pleasures
In time, the veins were spent and profits dwindled.
When the drama ended and the curtain fell,
the miners vanished - leaving only ghost towns behind
and a new state named for its reddish river – Colorado.
Aug 5, 2020
Aug 5, 2020 at 12:41 AM UTC
I visited Stratford-Upon-Avon one sunny day
I Saw the beauty of the swans and an old Shakespearian play
Statues and churches with stories to be told
I listened intently to learn about history 400 years old
But my favourite by far was sailing on the River Avon
who could not be enchanted by the character of the black and
white timbered haven?
Mar 3, 2012
Mar 3, 2012 at 4:58 PM UTC
not one person knew who lit the fire
at the old pub in the town's main drag
it will remain an unsolved piece of inquire
who on that night used a burner's tag
back in the year of nineteen fifty three
the watering-hole went up in flames
from the locale an arsonist did so flee
after playing his match striking games
a shadow some of the locals have seen
where the timbered hotel once stood
hovering around like a ghostly screen
this figure is an omen not of the good
if it could speak what would it ever tell
in regards to the starting of the inferno
which was like a flammable torching hell
one but surmises about events long ago
Mar 13, 2017
Mar 13, 2017 at 10:39 PM UTC
*The biochemical snow emanates bopping dejected the extended, short existences of winter,
Twisting and wandering in knee deep whiteouts that scream and moan,
The chemical spirit, at first light mildly falling in inverse star-shaped fragments,
Beseeches virtue before the wheezing shovels, the scraping ploughs,
The ghosts departed back to air in a crystal tune,
A triad stinging from the bare breach in grade school melodic period.
From the willowy walkway down the timbered trajectory,
Snowflake burdened branches combinate into a rhyme with the masked sun,
The raw, stripped light in overdue the hemlocks,
Stillness shattered only by the cracking cold.
The rivulet is icy over, yet liquid runs,
Underneath, under, deep in its veiled preserve,
Life, the anonymous shadow,
Scuttle’s from stone to stone,
Mingling up a smidgen of gravel from its silent inactivity.*
Feb 23, 2017
Feb 23, 2017 at 3:52 PM UTC
The beryl high land smoulders….
Where skinny manes of cloven trailing, cuff
the rake of jumbled scree,
a porous crux of timbered carol
matins from the mossy shrine
to urchin on the bluff and draft
in nooks of birch and bilberry.
On that high dais, Corvid tribals
potter on the reeks of gale.
Fell boatman of the troubled storeys
quarter in some sleet cabal
to throw their onyx gauntlet down
a slating arc of fallow sky.
Jun 17, 2016
Jun 17, 2016 at 9:58 AM UTC
denuded of cover
she stands all alone
without a leaf
upon her timbered bones
above in sombre grey skies
an uncaring sun hides
winter's whipping wind
lashes her hide
there she shivers
for want of warm light
there she quivers
through the gelid days and nights
the bitters iciness ever staying
with its freezing vetch
so cruelly parlaying
the end doth call
she dies
she dies
she dies
in winter's cold pall
Jul 22, 2014
Jul 22, 2014 at 6:32 AM UTC
We lived in a house a cleric built
In fifteen sixty-three,
Deep in a copse of Roman Elms
A grand and mighty tree,
The place was Tudor, half timbered,
And it creaked in every storm,
The wind was rattling through the eaves
Before we both were born.
We saw it up in the window of
The Realtor, going cheap,
It needed some TLC because
Its look would make you weep,
It badly needed a paint job and
Some timbers plugged with tar,
The years of rot had disfigured it,
‘Are you interested?’ ‘We are!’
Dead leaves had cluttered the downstairs rooms
And damp had swelled the floor,
The leadlight windows were dark with gloom
There were rats down in the store,
We worked and slaved on it, Jill and I,
Till it soon became a home,
Nestling in a hollow that
The locals called a combe.
I’d lie awake in the poster bed
That had been since Cromwell’s day,
The beams and curtains were overhead
And the wind would make them sway,
While Jill slept soundly, I still could hear
The wind sough through the trees,
Come rattling up to the shutters and
Slip gently past the eaves.
But then some nights, I’d hear some muttering
Down there by the elms,
Like ghosts of soldiers, loud and stuttering
Underneath their helms,
And then I’d hear the sound of marching
To a Roman beat,
There wasn’t even a pavement but
It sounded like a street.
A street that clattered with cobblestones
To the sound of chariot wheels,
I’d stare on out from the window-sill
To see what night reveals,
But nothing moved in the shady wood
To make those strangest sounds,
I searched and searched in the daylight, through
Those ancient wooded grounds.
Then one day digging a garden patch
I came across a stone,
That held a funny inscription on
The face, that smacked of Rome,
I think it mentioned a Lucius
From Legion Twenty-Nine,
I pried it out of the ground and then
I knew what I would find.
He lay there still in his breastplate
With his helmet and his sword,
His sandals still on his feet and tied
On tight, with a rotted cord,
The skull stared up at me in dismay
As if to say, ‘Who’s there?
You’ve broken into my endless sleep,
Invaded my despair.’
I swiftly covered him over so
That Jill would never see,
A sight to give her the nightmares that
I knew would come to me,
But then I settled his stone upright
That he might rest in bliss,
And that was the end of the mutterings,
From that day until this.
David Lewis Paget
Jan 19, 2017
Jan 19, 2017 at 7:34 AM UTC
The house had an evil aspect as
It hung out over the street,
Casting a permanent shadow there
Where the market stalls would meet,
The first floor was half-timbered, with
The ground floor made of stone,
The windows were made of pebble glass
And the window frames of bone.
No one had lived in the house for years
Til the Robinson’s moved in,
A couple, straight from the wedding church
Where they’d cleansed themselves from sin,
They’d listened to all of the rumours that
The house had its share of ghosts,
But the cheapness of the peppercorn rent
Had influenced them most.
The house was built where a charnel house
Had stood in the days of plague,
Where later a debtors’ prison stood
Though its history was vague,
They said there had been a gallows there
With a trapdoor through the floor,
And the arm of the ancient gallows now
Was the lintel of a door.
But the Robinson’s had sailed right in
With a mop and a whisking broom,
‘In no time, it’ll be **** and span,’
Said Sally, within the gloom,
While Brad had opened the shutters then
To let all the light stream in,
‘We’ll flush the ghosts from their waiting posts
With a broom and a pound of Vim!’
They dusted down the old furniture
Left sitting since George the Fourth,
And turned the old oak table round
So the end was facing north,
‘But still there’s a dampness in the air,
And a tension that feels grim,’
Sally said, as they lay in bed,
And she clung, so close to him.
‘Are you sure that they can’t get in,’ she said
‘Now we’ve flushed them out in the street?’
But Brad was trying to understand
Why the bed was cold at his feet.
‘Why are the sheets so damp,’ he said,
‘And they’re cold, as cold as sin,’
Sally was shivering, fit to burst
Though the sun came streaming in.
They sat at the old oak table with
Their bowls of soup, home-made,
And Sally reached out to hold his hand
But he started back, dismayed,
The soup was thick in the serving bowl
It was still three-quarters full,
When a swirl in the murky liquid then
Revealed a grinning skull.
Sally shrieked, but she couldn’t speak
And Brad had held his breath,
‘We’ve got to get out of this house today,
We’re surrounded here by death.’
The shutters slammed on the windows and
The doors flew shut on their own,
And barring the pebble windows were
The frames that were made of bone.
The people out in the market heard
The screams at an early hour,
Looked knowingly at each other, said,
‘They have them in their power!’
And Brad was hung from the lintel when
They finally broke inside,
While Sally was dead by a grinning skull
In the dress of a new-wed bride.
David Lewis Paget
Mar 26, 2014
Mar 26, 2014 at 6:24 PM UTC
the cup bought on a whim
one of those mornings
willing to spend more than five
for what should cost a buck
but the leaves drew me in
the circle broken by lame marketing
often the case in life
how easily we break our own circles
this morning alone i've reheated its contents three times
what used to be a daily purchase i now prepare at home
the cup its carry
i'm probably killing myself with the reheating
the construction recyclable but that means nothing
anymore
reheat inside of that and you'll get cancer
someone says
makes no sense though because the coffee is ******* hot
and the ******* cup holds it every day before it's reheated
i want to be that cup, i think
ready and willing to carry around the contents put upon it
no fuss or bustling
just a vessel
inanimate
thought little of, pushed to the corner of the closet
brought out for utility
how to be a cup?
how to trade the drive and flourish
the passion that keeps pounding away
the flashes of intensity that find their way into tiny timbered moments
silly though, because of course i can't be the cup
no more than i can be the actual coffee
Oct 17, 2017
Oct 17, 2017 at 10:04 AM UTC
Among the matted walls
the painted dolls
the cold crashes
timbered against us
fought to constrain us
thought they would rain us
but what fools
among these tools
we are what we are
no bonds
may bound us
no cage constrain
our lives
are open to take flight
to rule the night
we have it inside us
our release
begins not with constraint
our release
is a phantom
our release,
Our Release!
Jan 27, 2014
Jan 27, 2014 at 11:52 PM UTC
the elongated shadows of eve
across timbered paddocks were cast
a last remnant of sunlight
pierced through unto the grass
sparkling star light ensued
at the seventh hour of night
the bushland heavens adorned
in a display of mesmeric delight
dawn's breaking sun came to the fore
it shone on the homestead's verandah
with dazzling beams by the score
enchanting twas its extravaganza
tis a wonder of nature
observing the changing moods
of day to night
doth bring to the eye
such breathtaking sights
Jul 5, 2014
Jul 5, 2014 at 11:49 PM UTC