I can tell it’s probably not going to be much of a productive day when I spend ten minutes over morning coffee trying to match each color of the sunrise to its corresponding crayon.
Uplifting
when winter gets deep
into languishing hearts
poetry promises spring
Branching
this winter afternoon
i stare between bare
branches of gray trees
in the distance i see
an unreturnable past
or a dwindling future
i can’t tell which but
the silence is sublime
Chilly bedtime thoughts
Winter is the slow-down
Winter is the search for self
Winter gives the silence we need to listen
Winter goes gray so we can see our own colors
Hard to escape
Even happiness worries sometimes.
Only bruises
Poetry allows
my soul to age gracefully
my mind to land softly
amongst the new gray hairs —
without it I’d have thunked
into my forties with
tail bone, funny bone
and spirit broken
A life with papers
Any real writer — or reader — has had a papercut on the forehead
Breathlessly beautiful
Autumn breathes in golden sunshine and breathes out a frosty chill.
Forty-two-tick-tock
the body is a clock —
bones tick and tock
years gather in flesh
an alarm set for death
I stand amid the dust
In the rash lustihead of my young powers,
I shook the pillaring hours
And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears,
I stand amid the dust o’ the mounded
My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap.
—Francis Thompson, from “The Hound of Heaven,” 1890
Questions of the Sky
—Anonymous, The Queries Magazine, 1890
Fall, fall!
Fall, temperatures, fall, fall! Let the weather mellow and the year drift into peacefulness.
Flow with life
You’ve got to keep moving to keep the beauty of life in perspective. If you hold still too long, things go blurry.