Four Poems for Spring and Summer

Lone Goose on a Spring Night

Under the 360-degree celebratory continuous song dome of the spring peepers,
A lone goose is calling out in the dark.
Staccato honks plaintive and mournful, lost and alone.

She, I name her a female.
Is she laying eggs? Egg-bound? Lost from her companions? Mourning a death? Or is it unrequited love?

Unsleeping in darkness,
I turn my prayers from the state of the world and our destruction of human beings, to her unrelenting distress,
In hopes of my solitary night pleas rewarding one poor victim.
As they say in fairy tales, to no avail.

In the morning, the frogs give way to the birds,
Each outlines the day’s trajectory.
The goose calls are exchanged for those of a lonely turkey,
Common ground bound by solos.

The unseen world shrivels as daytime gathers its clothing,
Hands shoved into the pockets of torment.
Orange tree trunks against the pale blue sky announce the sun.
I put on my own clothes,
But hints of darkness are still carried in the folds.

Storm King

Thunder shakes the house,
The king of the mountain has come,
To break down the walls
Perceived as shelter,
To sluice off our dust,
To bring us home to earth.
A swift rain falls,
Sweetening the air and chilling it,
The trees and plants bow in surrender
But they are glad of it.

Stutterer

When I write, in private,
I am a stutterer
coming close to the word,
The kernel of a thought
I pause, struggling in vain to write it.

Searching for the word,
In my mind
Rearranging
To replace what I cannot say,
But have the same meaning.

While my heart beats fast with anxiety
Of non-expression
I am not patient enough to wait,
And supply a word, looking for recognition of its meaning in a pause.

Sometimes it is easier to say nothing,
Rather than struggle with meaning,
Or time.

Raining

Raining, the gathering light picking out the silhouette, first the undulant edges, then lush and transient individual leaves of deciduous trees, lush but flattened. They clap their hands, refreshed, rustling in the breeze in a biblical way as the edge of the cloud appears, shell pink and baby blue behind it. Sunshine after rain- it’s such a cliché omen, but I am bound to stumble over one and make it my own at times and give it, in the end, my amen.

Thanks for reading my work. It has been difficult to finish thoughts this year- an onslaught of work, the state of the world and generalized depression over our inability to treat each other as human, treat our world as worth saving, or value our children and elders, in addition to excessive heat and smoke of burning landscapes. Reading through one hundred or so unfinished pieces this week, I found these four that seemed only rough around the edges. I want to finish something, I thought, so here they are.

These poems were originally published on Medium, in the Lark. Thank you to the folks at Vocal for creating a format suitable for poetry publishing!

Natalie