In lieu of

sunflower
your fur salts the morning
green horns ring the bonfire
of your bloom, shaming the sun
 

we stand as twins, mirrors
turning with day
as though light holds
us to earth
not gravity
or root
 
when afternoon gives way
to the lacquer of night
do not look too closely
 
we may be gone

~~M.E. Hope

Like glass-blown gloves

The second day of 2021 dawned cold, not ice encrusted like the first, just cold with the slightest of misty rain hovering, but no freeze. Yesterday, New Year’s Day, the pines were weighed down with the ice, the cardinals spent a great deal of time posing within the frozen branches. At one point two dozen cardinals were showing out. I sing “cardinal party!” when I see so many around the house. The entire lyric to the cardinal party song consists of cardinal party, cardinal party. So, anyone can learn and serenade the birds. I imagine you can sing it to any bird, just throw their name in. It might be awkward to sing tufted titmouse party, tufted titmouse party, so adjust your tunes as needed.

Deborah A. Miranda posted a poem called, The Bones of Things, to her blog Bad NDNS on New Year’s Eve that has this:

“… twiggy fingers encased in ice 
like glass-blown gloves.”

The poem is lovely and vivid and filled with surprise. That I have a picture to place with it just makes me smile. The poem is a bright spot. Something you should go and read now. Run don’t walk. Find someone to read it to. Be safe, be kind.

2020 2021 does it matter?

 

The man I’ve known for thirty-seven years is having cookies and ice cream and watching a bad movie. This year ends and another begins. No resolutions needed or required. This past year has been unprecedented, but only in the way every year is, aren’t we're always encountering the unknown? Disappearing from the past; unknown by the future. Time would be difficult without the persons we know and love. We can reach out, send our words, share pictures and poems and books, jokes and help hold up one another’s defeat and grief. Thanks, and thanks and thanks again for the love. Be safe, be kind, be strong. 

Two poems and a Haibun, three pictures of starlings, Tuesday of the Cold Moon, watching this year draw to a close

 All that glitters

Starlings stop at the wall,
find my offering of bread
crusts and seeds.
 
In the fading light
they shine as though brushed
with gold leaf.
 
Thanks enough.

                 Anti-twitcher

The term "twitcher", sometimes misapplied

as a synonym for birder ~~Wikipedia

 

Starlings invade each spring

black bullet of rat-on-wings,

short-tailed speckle,

dog-diving blemish,

songbird plagiarist,

dirty hangers-on;

they own the wall

wing-flutter like heartbeat,

that drives the cats wild.

Murmuration

When the man walks into the room, seventy-three women breathe in as one. It had been five weeks since any of us had smelled a man, and he is clean, soap and cedar, a scent that wafts through the barracks, is fresh and dangerous; looking across the aisle at Bridgette, she closes her eyes and inhales deeply as he walks past. But he is not here to bring us back a part of life we have shut out.

Our CC’s, two slight women who both share the same last name, Riley, have become our warped den mothers, here to make us sailors. They are present to help this Chief, who is here to get us ready for an inspection. Today’s lesson is how to make us work as one team, one mindset as we prepare for this assessment and to help us to become that component we’ll need to be as we move on in the Navy. 

His first order is for us to remove our duty belts, thick, white web belts with a metal buckle that we wear as accompaniment to our dungarees. Then he tells us to push our bunks and lockers to the bulk head. As I’m pushing my rack I’m reviewing the order, settling it into my head; this is not to be a review of how to fold our blankets and t-shirts. Then we hit the line, stand at attention as he walks back and forth reading names, looking us in the eye, a movement we do not return. 

He barks, “Do you want to pass this next inspection?” 
As one we call out, “Sir, yes sir!”
“Are you ready to do anything for the sailors in your unit?”
“Sir, yes sir!”
“Are you prepared to help each other through this training?”
“Sir, yes sir!”
“Then drop to the deck and give me twenty!”

Bodies drop into push-up position and we call out, “Sir, one, sir! Sir, two, sir! Sir, three, sir!” Raising and lowering as one animal to the bright tile floor. At twenty, we rise, back into our lines, back to attention. He paces past Bridgette again, and she can’t help herself, she breathes in his scent, like succor. I try not to smile, and must duck my head ever so slightly to avoid her look at me across the aisle.

“Is there something funny recruit?” Petty Officer Riley asks, popping around the girl next to me.

“No, ma’am.” I say. She looks me over then walks on, getting people back on the line, stopping to listen to Recruit Garcia’s ragged breathing. Garcia is from Texas, some rural enclave where she lived with her grandparents and younger brothers. Joining the Navy was her grandfather’s idea, he needed her to get out in any way possible. She is barely eighteen and scared. She is so afraid she’ll be sent home, she literally shakes every time we line up. After Riley moves down the room, I whisper, “Deep breaths. Deep breaths.” She clenches and unclenches her fists, but her breathing evens and she relaxes before the next command is barked.

“Duty belts on, straighten those racks and lockers!”

We do as we’re told a blur of motion and then we’re ordered outside into formation, then "let’s do some marchin’, " the word is spit out, hits us like a knife edge; away we go left and right, left and right, flanking, flanking, reverse direction, left and right. All the while being assaulted “you are a unit, you will work as one” from all sides. We are halfway down another pass on the grinder we hear “to the rear march” and as one body we turn.

shadow on the sky
starlings wheel 
wings in one motion

Blackbird fly

 

I stop when wings whisper above me.
I look up I follow flight. I follow acrobats
through trees, I follow their color flash
and song stutter as they swing from branch
to eaves, rooftops. I lean back and
watch as the mockingbird and jay rise
high in the pine and meet the morning sun.
Sparrows bicker and Cardinals titter. A long
rope of blackbirds passes over me, one
minute, two, three and then four, five before
they clear, over the trees and gone.

On the passing of Barry Lopez

“Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience; to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder upon it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of the moon and the colors of the dawn and dusk.” ― Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

I read Arctic Dreams in Norfolk or San Diego, one of those edge of an ocean Navy towns. It was an introduction to Barry Lopez. It would have to have been one of those occasions when I had a chunk of time to myself. So, Jerry was either deployed or we were still separated from one another by a whole country. Those long months in "foreign surroundings" were perfect for Lopez's work.

I was fortunate to hear Barry Lopez read, once at Fishtrap in Wallowa County and then again in Ashland at the Chautauqua Poets & Writers series. Over the years I dipped into his work or just stumbled across something that floored me. Those words will always be there. I love this quote from Love in the Time of Terror that originally was published in Orion and I "stumbled" upon via LitHub: "...is it still possible to face the gathering darkness, and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?"

Be safe, be kind, love and embrace fearlessly this burning world.

So this is Christmas

Be safe, be kind, wear your mask. Remember to ask,
 Are you okay? Then listen. Listen.