After sipping icy water spiced by moss-crowned leaves, the robin flies from the birdbath to the fence-top for a meeting with the squirrel. When they arrive, they find the sun already waiting at the spot. Welcome to my secret hideaway, says he. I’m surprised you found it. Then the clouds move, and the sun, the robin, and the squirrel disappear. And here we find the poet, not quite ready, in […]
Reading old dreams — as if the mind, upon entering, were a cave. September 4, 2021 . Memorial My day began in the middle of the night when, after emerging from a tall building that consisted only of stairs, landings, windows, and walls, I met a friend in an open grassy area that might have been a cemetery had there been any graves. The friend, a poet with whom I […]
and then you feel like a poet come back again,only to be loved this time around — scribbling furiously,toward the second time you are gratefully undone. “Toward the Second Time”Recently Banned Literature, August 17, 2016 Canvas 738 August 17, 2016 . [ 1176 ]
If you must have a hero, choose him well. Let him be someone who loves children and old people, and who has no blood on his hands. Better still, why not be a hero yourself? No investment is needed, only grace and truth. . A Closed Mouth Catches No Flies What shall we do with his long gray beard and hair, the tattered coat, this worn out shirt? Should he […]
I Wonder After a long absence, they began to fear for him, and so they sought him in the cave where he sometimes slept. He was not there; but they found a striking image of him which seemed to have etched itself onto one of the walls, where at certain times of the year water would seep through and trickle down. They gazed upon the image for a long […]
Emily Dickinson wrote a poem — I saw her put it on — thro’ the open window — and thro’ the window heard her call it — Snow. “Woman in White” Early one January evening. A Poet Making Scrambled Eggs A poet making scrambled eggs imagines chickens scratching in the yard, warm sun upon a never-painted fence, an old dog napping on the porch stoically resigned to all its […]
All these years later, I still find sadness, beauty, and hope in this little Bojangles of a poem. While we look back, let us go forth into the world, even if it’s where we’ve been all along. Auld Lang Syne I haven’t been this drunk in a long time, said the poet to his dog who had died years ago. But the story really begins when daylight licks his […]
Those bright-white buttons in green grass that remind you of a clown’s shirt and the way everyone laughs at his sadness except an old poet in the back row who swallows hard and says that’s fall for you and that kid in the long yellow bus on his way to love and loss and the moon And when the neighbor told me he’d scattered some grass seed where the […]
The trees are still bare, but their branches are a different color. The sky has changed, and although trees are not mirrors, I think they must reflect the images and light they do not absorb. Their sap, too, is rising, like blood just beneath the skin. We know, of course, that even the moon reflects the light of the sun. Rocks, soil, terrain — moonlight is sunlight, gracefully transformed. The […]
William Michaelian 