Birds beyond the twilight

Mercury nods, dipping low
Venus burns out for show
Jupiter gleams with moons alight
Crescent moon atop the sight.

Still, they seem, but edging west
seeking that horizon's rest.
Turning to the north, around,
we see a star in flight, no sound.

The Space Station makes its way
from left to right, it does not stay
in place but orbits, flung across space,
advances through the sycamore branches.

How many

How many times
How many ways
How many hopes
How many days

How many trials
How many ends
How many enemies
How many friends

How many starts
How many smiles
How many parts
How many miles.

Rose of Sharon needs milk

Five cents a basket won't do.
The fan belt, shredded, is through.
Cops with pick handles go where they will.
No one in the house can eat their fill.

Hope is somewhere on down the road.
The road, itself, is not a friend of Joad.
He's got to make a truce and walk along.
His only saving grace is being strong.

What is the way for those who are just weak?
Those whose radiators always leak,
Who cannot pick the quota though they try,
And find no sympathy each time they cry?

Those are the ones who seek a place.
Just a spot, a shaded seat where they find grace.
Weak or strong, the road is cruel.
On the move you can't trust any rule.

The rambling way is freedom of a sort,
But only from, not freedom for.
We listen to the gossip for report
Where profit from our labor is secure.

Mouldering in the air

John Brown, bitter-hued
beard rippling
battering at presumption
overriding all reason.

Leaving out each answer
hurling bloody questions
firing drama and denunciation
at all comers, in every season.

A stand once taken
not to be retreated
from or further into.
His barricades no pose, no position.

A low over the Great Lakes

You might just call it ordinary
watching clouds scud by the hills;
the dark's own fav'rite adversary,
sunrise the east sky fills.

What makes it strange a simple show
many may not have detected.
From south to north they stately go,
reverse of what's expected.

We're used to what we take as source
of how life should go our way
where things divert the normal course
until always is this day.

One and another

There was just something about it,
the Lunar Module, true spacecraft.
Made to fly in vacuum only,
a safe harbor, metallic life raft,
never feeling the air across her hull.
A truly unique creation,
Grumman-built, NASA planned,
exceptional transportation.
Drawn and built, paper & glue,
a thing of unearthly lines;
Every angle I knew by heart,
inside the cockpit from controls to signs.
So it was a silly but understandable thing
when a decade later at Scout camp,
my first canoe, aluminum-hulled
bore the unmistakable Grumman stamp,
and it pleased me beyond reason
to paddle across the lake, day or night
in a cousin of the Lunar Module,
gliding in my own unearthly flight.

Another decade further on
it was my transport with another.
Crossing every dawn, returning in the dark,
newly married, not quartered with the others.
We two, still strangers though knowing much
of each, working as staffers, together living,
our first summer together mostly apart:
except for those paddles each evening.
On cloudless nights, we'd pause halfway;
five hundred yards to either shore,
a hundred feet to unfelt lakebed below,
above the stars, the moon, and more.
We'd watch the Milky Way echo our path
and the stars too numerous for number,
infinity doubled in the still surface surrounding,
a moment more restful than all our slumber.
A Grumman vessel carried us, with caution
and good judgment taking us to the other side.
Unearthly, but heavenly, the journey ends
until our spacecraft takes us on another ride.

Another Lent

Days of ashes, or of mulch.
Leaf-litter sticking to my feet,
snow even a faint memory
of purity lost and sodden soil.

There are green shoots,
there is increasing light,
but the reality of it is not convincing.

I believe in the ashes
and the dust
and the possibility of repentance.

If not for myself,
at least for others.
Together, we go forward
to receive a mark that brushes off
before we even get home.

Later than night, I find a stray bit
scrawling an exclamation point down my collar.
It will take some scrubbing to get out.