Obstacle course

The morning fog obscures the trees 

But not the poles projecting from the lake.

 I assume they once supported a dock 

But now I am imagining 

 An obstacle course for ducks: 

Who’ll prove to be the fastest? 

The mallards, or the wood ducks; 

The mergansers or the wigeons; 

The scaups, the brants, the goldeneyes; 

The eiders, or the coots? 

My money’s on the buffleheads: 

I love the sound their wings make 

When their flock cruises in for a landing

And suspect they might be

Better at collaborating.

What doesn’t fit in

I’m admiring this tree, so robust, and so firm, 

Surrounded by these other trees,

 So tall, so thin, so willowy, so pale. 

This one is darker, thicker, browner, 

And clearly started life off kilter, 

Perhaps resisting some fierce and brutal wind, 

But righted itself by reaching out for help 

 With that big branch, which also soon 

 Grew straight and tall… 

And though I appreciate its majesty, I wonder 

If its color or its size, 

So different from the others, 

Make it feel lonely, or ashamed 

Despite its beauty and its power — 

I’m projecting, of course, the values of a culture 

That’s beginning to incarcerate 

All those who don’t fit in…

Simple losses still ache

One of our plum trees fell over yesterday; 

 We’re not sure why, though we suspect

 The deer (who have scratched my car 

By resting their hooves upon it 

While stretching up to eat plum leaves) 

May have leaned on it too hard 

And knocked it over.

 By the time we found it 

The leaves were mostly gone 

Leaving all those baby plums exposed: so sad!

Such a waste! I couldn’t bear it, 

So we plucked as many as we could 

And put them in paper bags to ripen, 

 Alerting the neighbors, 

And the folks who glean our trees for the homeless

 In case they could use some green ones. 

How is it i can ache for a tree 

And half my country can turn blind eyes 

To the depredations of ICE?

A fond farewell

As I say farewell to this special place, 

I take a photograph of these, 

The first of its flowers to greet me 

And the last to see me go, 

Knowing, as one does, with photos, 

That I’ll catch sight of them 

When I’m scrolling through the memories 

And smile, remembering the birds nest 

That was there when last I came: 

Each time, a gift, as if to say 

That we are always welcome here, 

And the house is as happy to have us 

As we are to rest within its walls. 

Can’t wait to come again!

Morning after blues

Lying in bed in the morning 

Remembering dinner the night before, 

Worrying… 

Does everyone do this? 

Analyze the subtle cues 

We may have missed in last night’s gathering? 

Wonder if we talked too much or too little, 

Said something wrong or laughed too loud 

Or failed to include someone in the conversation… 

As light slowly fills the room I raise the blinds. 

The haze that drifts over the mountain 

Has already faded away by the end of this poem, 

But the unease lingers.

I wish I knew

I wish I knew 

Where good paintings come from; 

Could tap automatically into that source — 

Not because I hope to have something to sell, 

But because it would be nice to trust 

That when I put my brush to canvas 

The results will make me smile…

The course of history

Like this stellars jay, 

Examining the lawn for potential food, 

We look back over our past, 

Hoping to find the roots of our behaviors, 

Both personal and communal: 

The mistakes our parents may have made, 

The choices we made, raising our kids, 

Historical events that might — or should — 

Have been handled differently; 

Rules we should have made 

Or shouldn’t have broken — 

All the things that brought us here, 

To Now, this moment, where we sit, 

Staring out at nothing, 

Worried about what’s going down 

 And wondering how to change

The course of history.

Denied access

Inside, looking out at the gift of a beautiful day, 

My heart aches for all the people 

 Who are outside, looking in; 

Unwelcome and excluded; 

Denied access to the life every human deserves 

By circumstances not of their own making.

Brief celebrity

The amaranthine campion blossoms, 

Gleaming unexpectedly in the afternoon sun 

Call out from across the broad expanse of lawn, 

And I creep closer, like paparazzi 

 Hoping to catch them drinking 

Or maybe dancing in the light 

Before their evanescent celebrity fades.

Forgetting

Over time I have forgotten 

That daisies come in several different varieties, 

Some tall, some really short; 

Some that bloom earlier, or later, 

Or show off lots more petals or larger centers 

Than the ones that now are languishing 

Beneath my plum tree 

(Is this their natural cycle, 

To grow brown and lie down, 

As if their backs all hurt too much to stand, 

Or are they dying because I forgot to water them?) 

I’ve forgotten other things as well, 

But would rather have forgotten 

The things that wake me, 

Or still can make me cry: 

Man’s inhumanity to man, woman, and child; 

The yips of the coyotes as they feast;

The shrieks of the forest as it burns…

Unexpected blessings

A beautiful sunset last night 

Kept me out on the cliff for a while, 

But when I finally turned to come in,

 I could see 

That the flags we strung up to keep the birds 

From flying into our windows echo 

The colors of the sunset; 

That we accidentally found a way 

To bring the joy of color into our lives 

All day long, just by trying to save the birds. 

And isn’t that often true: 

 That in working to protect 

Something other than ourselves, 

We are granted untold, 

 Unexpected blessings?

Day’s end

At the end of the day 

We pause to watch 

The end of the day, 

Drinking in the colors of the sky 

While dreaming and planning 

What tomorrow might bring: 

Its challenges and triumphs, 

Heartaches and opportunities —

As if we could control any of that…

Your inner landscape

Whatever your outer landscape may be — 

City, or forest; desert, farmland, or sea — 

Your inner landscape’s a choice: serene, 

Or troubled; filled with joy or angry; 

Grateful or vindictive and obsessed 

With revenge… you get to paint that picture. 

What will it look like today?

Transforming bitterness

Ours is not the cherry tree 

Whose blossoms glow pink in Spring, 

Or whose leaves provide a maroon contrast 

To the other trees in the garden, 

Nor does its fruit have that cloying sweetness 

That goes so well with chocolate. 

No; these cherries, so ripe and beautiful, 

Are as sour and bitter 

As missing the ferry by a single car 

Or coming in second place, and yet 

They’re perfect for making pies. 

How can we turn our bitterness into 

Sweet pies, and sweeten the world?

The path of love

Light weaves a path through these grasses 

As love weaves a path through life — 

The only path we can follow 

 That leads to wholeness. 

We’ll never get there while we’re snarling 

At the souls who blindly chose 

To follow lies and are now too frozen 

By their need to have been right 

To see their way back to the light.

Why, and when?

Given what I have since learned,

I regret my all-too-human urge

To cast blame somewhere 

For the disaster at the Texas camp

Decimated by a flash flood.

Yet still I hold my sobbing daughter 

In my arms and mourn with her

Gazing out into the rain

As we weep together for children 

And parents everywhere:

Such cruel losses; hard to bear.

Nature’s gift

Awakened early by the summer’s light, 

I rise to greet the mountain 

And her ever-changing halo of clouds.

 I feed the cats, 

Then sit, and watch the foxglove 

Waving in the breeze. 

Whatever else the day brings, 

There’s still this: nature’s gift 

 Of morning.

When storms threaten

We used to have an inspirational 

 Poster in our office 

 That read “You can’t control the wind 

But you can adjust your sails.” 

But when the storm is clearly threatening 

And the sails are luffing in the wind, 

All that’s left is to take them down and pray 

You won’t get tossed in the rising waves. 

What then? It’s harder to find comfort 

In the sign that reads “This, too, shall pass.”

A hollow Fourth

Happy Fourth seems a hollow wish today, 

When the Declaration 

Of which we were so proud, 

With its statements of equality 

And inalienable rights 

 Is being hideously betrayed, 

And so, we mask our discouragement 

 And march, not for justice, 

But for food, and shared community, 

Loving family, friends, and neighbors 

 As best we can…

Sleeplessness

Last night, as I was crawling into bed, 

The conversation turned to Alligator Alcatraz.

 I struggled to get to sleep, 

And was awakened early by this poem: 

What kind of culture 

Locks its people 

Up like animals 

Without due process, 

And how can I fight cruelty 

When a poem’s the only weapon in my arsenal?

Greeting the day

Awakened by the golden clouds of morning, 

We rise to greet another day;

 Another opportunity 

 To weave a nest of kindness 

In which a troubled world might find relief.

In praise of adaptation

Mother Nature as the ultimate recycler: 

Who can create a tree from seed, 

Then grow it tall, 

And when it falls into the sea 

Invert its roots and let them stand 

Upon a beach 

 In solitary splendor, as if to say 

Each phase of life 

Has its own purpose, which evolves. 

Accept, and rejoice in, the change.