New Poems
| Still Life We have slipped by here, scarcely noticed, for generations; the trees we planted, oak and birch and eucalyptus, scarce reached our knees those days, now they rise stooping amongst scattered stars, against turquoise deepening to blue-pink, emerald, cobalt; we know – after the old folks with their hearth-music abandoned us – generations are layered beneath, and still the young hare leaps in the joy of morningflush while the mismatched mistlethrush will cock her speckled chest into the northern breeze: as it was, we say, in the beginning. I will turn soon into the broth of dreams, blue-pink, emerald, cobalt, a blade of grass of being, but for now I hold my hand against the sky and watch a star between my fingers, see the webbed flesh, feel the blood pulsing, and listen to the soft sigh lingering. for Michael Schmidt July 2008 |
| The Nest A dark world, its stench and cramp, its scramble, up in the acute angle of the gable wall, the jutting roof in its occlusion, dumping dark on dark; and then the beaks, yellow and livid and big almost as the bone-fluff bodies, the blind struggling for space, the sudden yawp for worm to be stuffed in the gawping maws from above; until there came a death of sorts, the adults urging, and the young swift was out and tumbling, sickeningly, down; but something within its being bloomed and there, suddenly, was the whole and unforeseeable earth and unlimited sky, the brash exultant rush of its body in instant mastery of the elements, those open meadows of the sky, those cloud-suffused blue fields, blue pasture-lands. August 2008 |