the world tells you again

in this fountaining the flutter
wing-dust and scattered
seed, greening

why should you not return
to heartening beneath
your one-note lament

and need for salt don’t say
it’s always the same
for when have you ever noticed

roses blown open to rain
robins food-screeching
in your window-tree?

Marking the edge of one of many circles

They speak their language and we listen
on the train, perhaps or at a café
lulled by the perceived music, drawn on
by one word in a dozen that stirs familiar
our ancient roots. Of course their talk
is as mundane as ours, all the daily needs
to communicate, to demand, make known
the self; but they in their world, we in ours—
messy, but for the moment not burdened
by meaning.

 

NaPoWriMo Day 25, prompt is to begin with a line from another poem. First line from Mark Jarman’s “Chimney Swifts,” which I discovered in the Bright Wings anthology. I also borrowed the title from Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”

Street-Corner Astronomy

Sidewalk telescope:
deep dark and cold, scattered stars—
hope constellations

Inspired by this article about Baltimore’s “star hustler.”