Black on White

This is why I like to write:

These perfect forms of black on white,

As they rollick atop as if on air

On clouds of paper, free and fair.

I test the waters with something true

Like robin’s-egg blue,

Or ocean surf,

Or anything I can name 
From my own home turf.

My words venture forth in a stumble,

While I seek the speech of my self’s own mumble.

I greet the night as I greet the day,

With words shaped from thoughts like clay.

Letters spill forth, as I type to keep pace

With inner visions seeking outer space.

Just black symbols formed amid white gaps —

Nothing is final and nothing lasts.

Moonrise

Come back to us.

Return with your sun-reflected orange light,

A zig-zag stagger squiggling in the swirl of the sea.

You are evidence of darker, lifeless bodies out there.

You bear the scars of meteor-mad millennia.

You bring tides to shore and us to us.

You tug at our eyes.

Unveil them.

Captured in your pull,

We have nowhere to go, and neither do you.

You sit enthroned in fevered

Light tonight, a part of us broken off, aloft.

Hang in balance, old one, lifeless one.

Turn in darkness and give back light,

Even if you will never

glow alone.

August 10 (for Glenn)

A blue sky decorated

With a frosting of cloud — 

And you are not here.

The candles of the sun

93 million miles away

Warms my skin —

And you do not sit beside me.

The rivers of wind

Give voice to the trees —

And you speak only in

The stillness between breaths.

There will be no celebration today,

No cake with 50 candles,

No songs to be sung,

No sweetness of laughter on the tongue —

Only the morsels of memory

Remain to sustain us.

A New Life

You could wake up to anything.

That is the fear.

The family splintered,

The bad cell gone haywire,

The wrong turn into the tree.

You can withstand these unknowns because

You are human, and you hope.

You bring this to the game:

Your fortitude and your heart.

You now see there is only love,
Built up behind your eyes,

A truth known to your innermost self.

You have nothing else,
Because you are poor,

But the heart brings you wealth.

You cannot turn back the clock.

You can only tick with the time,

And dream of better days ahead.

October 19 (for Nina)

Whatever else in the world
Does not matter.
The centuries-old grudges,
The wars, the suffering, the misunderstandings
In ten thousand dark corners.
One look from this child and it all falls away ...

You have always been this way
From the moment you emerged,
Blinking, warm, and wet,
Into the glowing white light
of a Boston birthing room
Four years ago this morning
At 8 o'clock.
You embodied peace,
You emitted a light
To show us
what remains possible.

Bright Blue Bird Eating From My Hand

Descendent of dinosaurs,
this dainty delight flitters
like pure spirit in my hand.
The feel of the scratchy tickle of
the clawed foot in my seed-filled palm.
"Trust me," I try to telegraph, "and eat."
The fragile heads pecks and picks out a single seed,
then alights in a blink to a nearby skeletal branch.

Hearts

They thump along

Within our breasts,

Moving to the same

Rhythm, whether 

pope or prostitute,

Teacher or terrorist,

Lamb or lion.

The blood courses in us.

We are the blood and

The blood is in us,

No different from

one to the next.

The same valves, 

Chambers, and arteries that

Clog with our excesses are

Capable of such brightness:

Tears and joy bunch up

Inside these walls.

All beings arise from the heart.

The place of sadness and hope, 

Soul's winter and summer —

From the salmon struggling upstream

To the Peruvian peasant
On the mountainside,

We all exact a beat

That illuminates the world.