Sky blue home
Delicate as a kiss
Surrounds like a caress
The green life.

It will only last a spring's brief week
If that,
But home will remain
In the amphibian
Heart
On those summer nights when he is sated
With flies and mosquitoes.

Home will call
And he will yearn
Sated but unsatisfied
Until he find again
The ephemeral kiss of home
And the caress
Of the blue sky.

You said you do not like

Silly books of fantasy.

But what remains without them?

Just analysis and games.

(And even they do not escape it.)

I cannot see this world

Except with fantastic eyes

That dream

Imagine

Hope.

Puck magicks Shakespeare now

And angels message God.

The truth lives in the gap

Between

What is and what

Might be.

Fantasized, we journey

We soar.

Dreamless, we only sleep.

Poems, for me, are usually gifts that I receive. It may take hours and days to unwrap them and work with them, but they come to me a pure grace that I must refine in order to find the best of the gift. This morning early, I received this gift below. Hopefully, I have worked my part out to dig up the grace of it.

Yesterday, in the freshly turned earth
I sprinkled seed
With green hope that the wet, dark grit
That boasts the sweet smell of transformation
Would birth basil for fall pesto
And summer marigolds of yellow and orange.

This morning I find that others also have
Spring fever.
The red maple across the yard
Has flung its red propellored wings to the promising soil.
And among the veined, delicate embryos
More wings
White
And triangular
From a night moth
Whose body has gone to feed the wren chicks.

The Swan

I am reading a marvelous little book by Mary Oliver right now called Winter Hours. If you don't know Mary, you might look for her poems on line or dig into a library volume. She is a great New England poet of our own age after so many that have written before her. Mary speaks honestly and simply about what a poem must be for her in winter hours; and her honesty is disarming and lovely. She says, among other things, that at their best moments her poems ask a question and leave it unanswered. I know, I think, what she means. But I am not sure if it is really to leave the question unanswered so much as to be faithful and courageous enough to ask the questions and point at answers that are all beyond the light our human eyes can see -- to reach in the shadows of something greater than we will ever know with our minds or words or touching or chewing. For me the best poetry doesn't just ask questions, but it looks beyond questions to the deeper challenge where wordy questions fall apart, crack under the strain, and become so much distance between the truth and our little brains. I am not sure she -- Mary Oliver -- would disagree with me here. She lets her luminous poem, The Swan, speak of this in ways her simple words in the prelude to the poem cannot. The Swan does ask a question without an answer. But the question itself already points beyond the words to white wings and other shores beyond our knowing. May we never, in poetry or life, settle for even good questions without answers but always journey beyond.

A poem to begin

Guide us
Slowly
To Holy Ground
Remove what protects us from place.
Barefoot, ignite us, Sinai's bush,
To flame and fire your pace and call
And loose creation's harsh clenched fist
To plant your garden, one and all,
Where silence speaks
Whispers again
To ground us
Neighbors
Foe and friend
With hoeing dance
And wind's sung toil.
Spring us, spirit us
To wholly rest --
A sabbath always our center
Where green life
Awakens
To stretch
And breaks our hard coat
Opening
Us
To the earth
Where we expand,
Tentatively,
First down
Then up
To rise
Rooted
Spread forth
To sun --
Wild word
Cultivated
In rich soil.